With the lunch basket on the running board of the motor they ate sitting on the low boundary wall of the lawn.  The heat increased through the late May noon, and Howat remained while Mariana and James Polder wandered in the direction of the orchard.  Finally the sun forced the former to move; and he, too, proceeded in a desultory manner, entering the shade of a grove of old maples.  The trees, their earliest red leafage already emerald, followed the dry channel cut back from Canary Creek to the Forge, and he soon emerged at the broad, flashing course of the stream.  A flat rock jutted into the hurrying water by an overthrown dam, its sun-heated expanse now in shadow; and he stayed, listening to the gurgling flow.  Far above him a hawk wheeled in ambient space; a mill whistle sounded remotely from Jaffa.

The thought of Mariana hovered at the back of his lulled being; all he desired, he told himself, was her complete happiness.  He might even have become reconciled to James Polder.  His first, unfavourable opinion of the latter, he realized, had been modified by—­by time.  He had judged Polder solely in the light of an old standard.  The fellow was painfully honest; good stuff there, iron ... the iron of the Pennys.  But the other strain had betrayed him.  A cursed shame.  The material of the present, moulded, perhaps, into seemingly new forms, was always that of the past.  This Polder was Essie Scofield and Jasper ...  Byron.  He, Howat Penny, was Penny and Jannan and Penny—­Daniel, James, Casimir, and Howat once more, the older Howat who had married the widow of Felix Winscombe.  Black again.  He wondered what the blackness, not spent like his own, had brought the other.  A headstrong, dark youth with the characteristic sloping eyebrows and slender, vigorous, carriage.  The traditional rebellious spirit had involved Jasper in disgrace; it had thinned his own blood.

Footfalls approached through the trees, and the others joined him.  James Polder extended himself on the rock, and Mariana sat with her hands clasped about her slim knees.  A silence intensified by the whispering stream enveloped them.  The hawk circled above, and Howat had an extraordinary sense of the familiarity of the bird hanging in limitless space, of the warm stone and water choking in a smooth eddy.  He had, as a boy, fished there.  But his brain momentarily swam with a poignant, unrecognizable emotion, different from the sensation of childhood.  He rose, confused and giddy.  With old age, he muttered.

Mariana followed.  “It’s all over,” she announced, decisively.  “We’ll drive back and leave to-day.”  She sighed.  “That’s gone already,” James Polder showed her the sun slipping toward the western hills.  She moved up to him, laid her hand on his arm.  Howat Penny went ahead.  He must speak to her after dinner.  As the motor slowly gathered momentum he turned and looked back at the dark, pinkish dwelling in its tangle of grass and bushes run wild.  Dusk appeared to have already gathered over it, although the sun still shone elsewhere in lengthening dusty gold bars; the wide-spread beech was sombre against blank shutters, the chimneys broken and cold.