net of circumstance.  A great deal had been upset since his day, when the boxes and pit had been so conveniently separated; old boundaries no longer defined, limited, their content; social demarcations were being obliterated by a growing disaffection.  It was very unfortunate, for, as he was seeing, unhappiness ensued.  It was bound to.  An irritability seized him at being dragged into such useless conjecturing; into, at his age, confusing complications; and he greeted with relief the long, low front of his dwelling at Shadrach, its old grey stone a seeming outcropping of the old green turf, the aged, surrounding trees.

XXIX

Mariana, however, followed him almost immediately.  She stood before him in an informal, belted black wool sweater, a ridiculously inadequate skirt, and the solid shoes he detested on women.  But he soon forgot her garb.

“Howat,” she told him, “I have made a cowardly and terrible mistake.  I was meant to marry Jimmy, and I didn’t.  Perhaps I have ruined his life.  Mine will be nothing without him.”  They were in the middle room, and a fire of hickory was burning in the panelled hearth.  She dropped on a chair, and sat gazing into the singing flames.  Here it’s all to do over, he thought, with a feeling of weariness.  “He may get along very well with his Harriet,” he remarked, resentful of his dissipated contentment.

“You know he won’t,” she replied sharply.  “He loves me; and I love him, Howat.  I never knew how much, or how little anything else mattered, until I was in my room, after his wedding.  It wasn’t a wedding, really,” she declared.  “All that doesn’t make one.  He’ll find it out, too.  Jimmy will be desperate, and I’m afraid he will drink harder.  He told me they were getting frightfully strict about that at the Works.  And there’s that reorganization; it will embitter him if he isn’t made superintendent.  He has worked splendidly for it.  That woman he—­he went off with is a squash,” she said vindictively.  “She will be in bed when he goes away in the morning, and in crepe de Chine negligee when he gets back.  Perhaps it won’t last,” she added thoughtfully.

The sense of future security generated in Howat Penny by the marriage abruptly departed.  He fumbled with his glass, directed it at Mariana.  “What do you mean by that?” he demanded.  “I would go to him like a shot, if he needed me,” she coolly returned.  The dreadful part of it was that he was sure she would.  “Nonsense,” he asserted, hiding his concern; “there will be no fence climbing.”  All this came from the letting down of conversational bars, the confounded books he found about on tables.  Words, like everything else, had lost their meanings.  In his day a bad woman was bad, a good, likewise, good; but the Lord couldn’t tell them apart now.  It was the dancing, too.  Might as well be married to a man, he thought.