“Mr. Forsythe said your father was an Ironmaster, one of the biggest in the Province, and I suppose you’ll become that too.”  She gazed about at the hills, sheeted in scarlet and yellow, at the wide sunny hollow that held Myrtle Forge.  “Here,” she added in a totally unexpected accent of feeling, “it is very beautiful, very big.  I thought all the world was like St. James or Versailles.  I’ve never been to Poland, my mother’s family came from there to Paris, but I’m told they have forests and such things, too.  This is different from Annapolis, that is only an echo of London, but here—­” she gazed far beyond him into the profound noon.

He recovered slowly from the surprise of her unlooked for speech, attitude.  Howat studied her frankly, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.  Her discontent was paramount.  It was deeper than he had supposed; like his there were disturbing qualities in her blood, qualities at a variance with the obvious part of her being.  A sense of profound intimacy with her pervaded him.

“This,” she continued, “is like a cure at a Bath, a great bath of air and light.  I should like to stay, I think....  Are you content?”

“It always seemed crowded to me,” he admitted.  “Usually I get as far away as possible, into the woods, the real wilderness.  But you heard my father last night—­I’m a black Penny, a solitary, dark lot.  You couldn’t judge from what I might feel.”

“Your father and you are not sympathetic,” she judged acutely.  “He is practical, solid; but it isn’t easy to say, even with an explanation, what you are.  In London—­but I’m sick of London.  Myrtle Forge.  It’s appalling at night.  I’d like to go into the real wilderness, leave off my hoops and stays, and bathe in a stream; a water nymph and you ... but that’s only Watteau again, with a cicisbeo holding my shift and stockings.  In London you’d be that, a lady’s servant of love; but, in the Province, I wonder?”

He sat half comprehending her words mingling in his brain with the pounding of the trip hammer at the Forge, one familiar and one unfamiliar yet not strange sound.  Above them, on the lawn, he could see Myrtle—­through the middle of the day the sun had increased its warmth—­with skirts like the petals of a fabulous tea rose.  The sun glinted on the living gold of her hair and bathed an arm white as snow.  David was there no doubt.  His thoughts dwelt for a moment on Caroline, then returned to Mrs. Winscombe, to himself.  His entire attitude toward her, his observations, had been upset, disarmed, by her unexpected air of soft melancholy.  In her lavender wrap she resembled a drooping branch of flowering lilac.  She seemed very young; her air of sophistication, her sensuality of being, had vanished.  Traces of her illness on shipboard still lingered darkly under her eyes.  Asleep, he suddenly thought, her face would be very innocent, purified.  This came to him involuntarily; there was none of the stinging of the senses she had evoked in him the night before.  His instinct for preservation from any entanglements with life lay dormant before her surrender to influences that left her crumpled, without the slightest interest in any exterior fact.