An awkward silence had developed on top of the brief political acerbities.  There was no sound but the singing of the wood in the open stove.  Myrtle had an absent, speculative gaze; Caroline was biting her lip; Mrs. Winscombe yawned in the face of the assembly.  Gilbert Penny suggested cards, but there was no reply.  Howat left the room by a door that opened on a rock threshold set in the lawn.  The night was immaculate, still and cold, with stars brightening in the advance of winter.  He walked about the house.  The counting room of the forge was a separate stone structure back of the kitchen; and to the right, and farther away, was a second small building.  The ground fell rapidly down to the Forge on the water power below.  He could barely discern the towering bulk of the water wheel and roofs of the sheds.

He felt uneasy, obscurely and emotionally disturbed.  Already Fanny Gilkan seemed far away, to have dropped out of his life.  He would give some gold to the charcoal burner he had attempted to shoot.  Mrs. Winscombe annoyed him by her attitude toward Myrtle Forge, her unvarnished air of condescension.  How old was she?  A few years more than himself, he decided.  The Italian hooked her into her stays.  A picture of this formed in his thoughts and dissolved, leaving behind a faint stinging of his nerves.  He recalled her bare—­naked—­arms ... the old man, her husband.

She had spoken of Italian parties; he had seen a picture on a fan labelled Villeggiatura—­a simpering exquisite in a lascivious embrace with a frail beauty on the bank of a stream, and a garland of stripped loves reeling about a slim, diapered Harlequin.  It was a different scene, a different world, from the Province; and its intrusion in the person of Mrs. Winscombe was like an orris-scented air moving across the face of great trees sweeping their virginal foliage into the region of strong and pure winds.

He was dimly conscious of the awakening in him of undivined pressures, the stirring of attenuated yet persisting influences.  He was saturated in the space, the sheer, immense simplicity of the wild, hardly touched by the narrow strip of inhabited coast.  He had given his existence to the woods, to hunting cunning beasts, the stoical endurance of blinding fatigue; he had scorned the, to him, sophistications of bricks and civilization.  But now, in the length of an evening, something invidious and far different had become sentient in his being.  Italian parties, and Covent Garden with lanterns among the trees ...  Trees clipped and pruned, and gravel walks; seductions.

A falling meteor flashed a brilliant arc across the black horizon, dropping into what illimitable wilderness?  Fireworks set to the shrill scraping of violins.  One mingled with the other in his blood, fretting him, spoiling the serene and sure vigour of youth, binding his feet to the obscure past.  Yet colouring all was the other, the black Welsh blood of the Pennys.  Ever since his boyhood he had heard the fact of his peculiar inheritance explained, accepted.  In the past he had been what he was without thought, self-appraisal.  But now he recognized an essential difference from his family; it came over him in a feeling of loneliness, of removal from the facile business of living in general.