There were two handwritings, listing commonplace transactions now invested by time with an accumulated, poignant significance, one smooth and clerkly, the other abrupt, with heavy, impatient strokes.  Youth, probably, held at an unwelcome task; and, more than likely, Howat ...  October, in seventeen fifty.  Years of virility, of struggle and conquest, of iron—­iron, James Polder had shown him, still uncorrupted, better than the metal of to-day—­and iron-like men.  The ledger slipped to the floor, tearing the spongy leather and crumbling the sere leaves.  He recovered it, dismayed at the damage wrought.  A sheet apparently had come loose, and he bent forward with difficulty, a swimming head.  Howat made an attempt to find its place, when he discovered that it was not a part of the volume.  It was, he saw, a note, obliterated by creases but with some lines still legible, hurriedly scrawled, by a woman: 

“You must be more careful ...  Your mother.  So hot-headed, Howat.  I can’t do what you ask.  I have a headache now thinking about Felix and you and myself.  No one must find out.”  What followed was lost, then came a signature that, with the aid of a reading glass, he barely deciphered—­“Ludowika.”

That was the name of the woman, a widow, Gilbert’s son had married.  Her first husband, Felix Winscombe, had died at Myrtle Forge during a diplomatic mission from England....  An old man with a young wife!  His confusion, slowly resolving into a comprehension of what the note implied, filled him with an increasing revolt.  The earlier Howat, too, like Jasper, in the tangle of an intrigue—­not a public scandal and shame, as had been the later, but no less offensive.  In a flare of anger Howat Penny crumpled the paper and flung it into the fire.  There it instantly blackened, burst into flame and wavered, a shuddering cinder, up the chimney.  He put the ledger, loosely wrapped in its covering, on the table, and sat breathing rapidly, curiously disturbed.  The old fault, projected so unexpectedly out of the faithless burial of the past, struck at him with the weight of a personal affront.

The heat subsided in the hearth, with the nightly ebbing of steam in the radiator; the hickory, disintegrating into blocks, faded from cherry red to pulsating, and finally dead, ash.  Lost in the bitterness of his thoughts he made no movement to replenish the fire.

He wondered if the explored histories of other families would show such scarring records as his own.  Were there everywhere, back of each heart, puddles, sloughs, masked in the deceiving probity maintained for public view?  And now—­Mariana!  Yet, somehow, her affair did not appear as ugly as these others.  Stated coldly, in conventional terms, it was little different.  Why, in plain words she had ... but Mariana evaded plain words, her challenging courage forbade them.  Here was more than could be arraigned, convicted, by a stereotyped judgment.  Or perhaps this was only his affection for her, blinding him to the truth.