It transpired that the Italian servant was to be left at Myrtle Forge; he was now assisting the servants in strapping a box behind the chaise that was to carry Mr. Winscombe and David to the city.  Howat pictured the long, supple hands of the Italian hooking Mrs. Winscombe into her clothes, and a sudden, hot revulsion clouded his brain.  When the carriage had gone, and he stood in the contracted space of the counting room, before a long, narrow forge book open on a high desk, he was still conscious of a strong repulsion.  It was idiotic to let such an insignificant fact as the Winscombes’ man persistently annoy him.  But, in a manner entirely unaccountable, this Cecco had become a symbol of much that was dark, potentially threatening, in his conjectures.

The hammer fell with a full reiteration through the afternoon; the sun, at a small window, shifted a dusty bar across inkpots and quills and desk to a higher corner.  He could hear the dull turning of the wheel and the thin, irregular splash of falling water.  Other sounds rose at intervals—­the tramping of mules dragging pig iron from Shadrach, the rumble of its deposit by the Forge.  Emanuel Schwar entered with a piece of paper in his hand.  “Eleven hundred weight of number two,” he read; “at six pounds, and a load of charcoal.  Jonas Hupp charged with three pairs of woollen stockings, and shoes for Minnie, four shillings more.”

Howat mechanically entered the enumerated items, his distaste for such a petty occupation mounting until it resembled a concrete power forcing him outside into the mellow end of the day.  A figure darkened the doorway; it was Caroline.  “I hardly saw him,” she declared hotly.  “Myrtle hung like a sickly flower in his buttonhole.”  Her hoops flattened as she made her way through the narrow entrance.  “There’s one thing about Myrtle,” she continued, “she’s frightfully proper in her narrow little ideas.  Myrtle’s a prude.  And I promise you I won’t be if I get a chance at David.”  She stood with vivid, parted lips, bright eyes; almost, Howat thought, charming.  Such a spirit in Caroline amazed him; he hadn’t conceived of its presence.  He recognized a phase of his own contempt for customary paths, accepted limitations and proprieties.  “Remember David’s Quaker training,” he told her in his habitual air of jest.  “David’s been to London,” she replied.  “I saw him pinch the Appletofft girl at the farm.”

Again in his room, he changed into more formal clothes than on the evening previous; he did this without a definite, conscious purpose; it was as if his attitude of mind required a greater suavity of exterior.  He wore a London waistcoat, a gift from his mother, of magenta worked with black petals and black stone buttons; his breeches were without a wrinkle, and the tails of his coat, even if they were not wired like those David was said to have brought from England, had a not unsatisfactory swing.