A pervasive stillness settled upon Shadrach; outside the sunlight lay on the hills in a thick, yellow veil; the cool interior held only the familiar crepitation of the old clock above.  Now, he told himself, he could read the papers peacefully; but he sat with empty hands.  Mariana had gone.  “Outrageous conduct,” he said aloud, without conviction.  His voice sounded thin, unfamiliar.  His dreams of her continued superiority to the commonplace, of her fine aloofness like the elevation of the strains of Orfeo, had been utterly destroyed.  He could not imagine a greater descent than the one which had overtaken her.  As he rehearsed its details they seemed increasingly disgraceful.  He could not forgive James Polder for his relapse, his shocking failure to maintain the standards, the obligations, bred into himself, Howat Penny, by so many years, and by blood.  It was that miserable old business of Jasper’s once more, blighting the present, betraying Mariana.

This wheeled in his brain throughout summer.  He had, as he expected, no word from her.  Charlotte, too, sent no line; he was isolated in the increasing and waning heat, in a sea of greenery growing heavy and grey with dust, then swept by rain, and touched with the scarlet finality of frost.  Rudolph lit again the hickory fires in the middle hearth; the days shortened rapidly; sitting before the glow of the logs he could see, through a western window, the afternoon expiring in a sullen red flame.  The leaves streamed sibilantly by the eaves and accumulated in dry, russet heaps in angles and hollows; they burned in crackling fires, filling the air with a drifting haze rich with suggestion and memories.  He saw the first snow on a leaden morning when the flexible and bald white covering, devoid of charm, held the significance of barrenness, death.  All day this chilling similitude lingered in his mind.  He walked about the house slowly, unpleasantly conscious of the striking of his feet on the wood floors.

At Christmas a revival of spirit overtook him; a long letter came from Mariana, Bundy Provost sent him a tall silver tankard, with a lid, for his night table.  Howat, polishing his glass with a maroon bandanna, read Mariana’s letter in the yellow light of the lamp and burning logs.

“I have been to see a new steel process,” she wrote; “the Duplex, with immense tilting furnaces and the Bessemer blast.  I know a great deal about iron now; far more than a Howat Penny who should be an authority.  Jim is frightfully busy, but lately he has been able to sleep after the night shift, which makes it better for every one.  He is one of the best men here, and that comes from the Works, and the reorganization is slowly but surely progressing, and we are progressing with it.  I am not a particle lonely, with only one servant; really don’t want another, and make a great deal more than desserts.  You have no idea how absorbing it is to have a lot of things that must be done.  The days simply fade.  You mustn’t worry about me, Howat; I always hated polite affairs and parties and people; even when I was young as possible I was more than anything else a Hell in the Corner.”