Without definite purpose they turned from the public way into an overgrown path, banked with matted blackberry bushes, and were soon facing the remains of the Furnace.  It had been solidly constructed of unmasoned stone, bound by iron rods, and its bulk was largely unaffected by time.  The hearth had fallen in, choked by luxuriant greenery; but the blank sides mounted to meet the walled path reaching out to its top from the abrupt hill against which it had been placed.  Before it foundations could still be traced; and above, a rectangle of windowless stone walls survived, roofless and desolate.  An abandoned road turned up the hill, and they followed it to where they could gaze into the upper ruin and the Furnace top below.  Everywhere nature had marked or twisted aside cut stone and wood with its living greenery.  Farther down a pathlike level followed the side of the hill, ending abruptly in a walled fall, and a confusion of broken beams, iron braces, and section of a large, wheel-like circumference.  Out beyond were other crumbling remains of old activity—­a stone span across the dried course of a water way, and a wide bank, showing through a hardy vegetation the grey-brown inequalities of slag.

The stillness, broken only by the querulous melody of a robin, and a beginning, faint piping of frogs, was amazingly profound after the roaring energy of the Medial Works.  The decay of Shadrach Furnace showed absolute against the crashing miles of industry on the broad river.  A breath of honeysuckle lifted to Howat Penny; the sky was primrose.  Mariana moved closer to him and took his arm.  They said nothing.

A warm light was spilling across the darkening grass from the lower windows of his dwelling, blurring in a dusk under the high leafage of aged maples.  The white roses were already in bud on the vine climbing the lattices at his door, and Mariana fixed one in his buttonhole.  “Howat,” she said, “it isn’t as if you were doing it just for Jim, but for a man, any man, really sick.  I’ll not even ask you to think of it for me.  He can sit on the porch and converse with your owls, and poke about over the hills.”

Howat considered the advisability of attempting to extract a promise from her that she would stay away from Shadrach if James Polder was there.  He considered it—­very momentarily.  The possibility, he asserted to himself, was without any alleviating circumstance.  What, in heaven’s name, would Charlotte think if, as it well might, the knowledge came to her that Mariana and a Polder—­that name she never repeated—­a married Polder without his wife, were poking over the hills together at Shadrach?  She would have him, Howat, examined for lunacy.  Mariana demanded too much.  He told her this with the dessert.