“Don’t you find anything here that pleases you?” Caroline demanded with asperity.

“Myrtle’s all right,” he admitted; “not many of them are as pretty.”

“I’ll tell her you’ve come,” Caroline promptly volunteered; “she won’t keep you waiting.  There she is!  No, it’s Mrs. Winscombe.”

She was swathed in a ruffled lilac cloak quilted with a dull gold embroidery; satin slippers were buckled into high pattens of black polished wood; and her head, relatively small with tight-drawn hair, was uncovered.  She was not as compelling under the sun as in candle light, he observed.  Her face, unpainted, was pale, an expression of petulance discernible.  Yet she was more potent than any other woman he had encountered.  “Isn’t that the garden?” she asked, waving beyond the end of the house.  “I like gardens.”  She moved off in the direction indicated; and—­as he felt she expected, demanded—­he followed slightly behind.

A short, steep terrace descended to a formally planted plot, now flowerless, enclosed by low privet hedges.  There were walks of rolled bark, and, against a lower, denser barrier, a long, white bench.  The ground still fell away beyond; and there was a sturdy orchard, cleared of underbrush, with crimson apples among the grey limbs.  Beyond, across a low, tangled wild, an amphitheatre of hills rose against the sky, drawn from the extreme right about the facade of the dwelling.  They seemed to enclose Myrtle Forge in a natural domain of its own; and, actually, Gilbert Penny owned most of the acreage within that immediate circle.

Mrs. Winscombe sank on the garden bench, where she sat with a hand resting on either side of her.  Above them a column of smoke rose from the kitchen against the blue.  A second, heavier cloud rolled up from the Forge below.  “They have been repairing the forebay,” Howat explained; “the Forge has been closed.  I’m supposed to be in the counting house.”

“You work?” she demanded surprised.

“At the ledger, put things down—­what the men are paid, mostly in tobacco and shoes, ozenbrigs and molasses and rum; or garters and handkerchiefs for the women.  Then I enter the pig hauled from Shadrach, and the carriage of the blooms.”

“I don’t understand any of that,” she announced.

“It probably wouldn’t interest you; the pig’s the iron cast at the furnace.  It’s worked in the forges, and hammered into blooms and anconies, chunks or stout bars of wrought iron.  We do better than two tons a week.”  The sound of a short, jarring blow rose from the Forge, it was repeated, became a continuous part of the serene noon.  “That’s the hammer now,” he explained.  “It goes usually all day and most nights.  We’re used to it, don’t hear it; but strangers complain.”