She rose, her gaze resting on Howat.  “I must go out,” she continued; “breathe.”  He was strangely reluctant to accompany her, his feet were leaden.  Nevertheless, in a few moments he found himself at her side on the lawn.  Her sophistication had again disappeared, beneath the stars drawn across the hills, over Myrtle Forge.  There was a pause in the hammering below.  “Take me down there,” she commanded.

He led the way on a beaten path that dropped sharply to a bridge of hewn logs crossing the spent water.  The Forge, a long shed following the stream, was open on the opposite side; an enclosure of ruddy, vaporous gloom with pools of molten colour, clangorous sounds.  The bubbling, white cores of three raised and hooded hearths were incessantly agitated with long rods by blackened and glistening shapes.  At intervals a flushing rod was withdrawn from a fire and plunged in a trough of water; a cloud of ghostly steam arose, a forgeman’s visage momentarily illuminated like a copper mask.  A grimy lantern was hung above the anvil, its thin light falling on the ponderous head of the trip hammer suspended at right angles from a turning cogged shaft projection through the wall.

The hearths, set in a row beyond the anvil, had at their back an obscure, mechanical stir, accompanied by the audible suction of squat, drum bellows.  The labour was halted at a fire; half naked anatomies, herculean shoulders and incredible arms, gathered about its mouth with hooked bars.  An incandescent mass was lifted, born, rayed in an intolerable white heat, into the air.  A hammer was swung upon it; and, as if the metal were sentient, a violet radiance scintillated where the blow had fallen.  The pasty iron was carried to the anvil, the hooks dropped for wide-jawed tongs; the trip hammer moved up and fell.  The hardening metal darkened to a carnation from which chips scattered like gorgeous petals.  The carnation faded under ringing blows; the petals, heaping in the penumbra under foot, were as vividly blue as gentians.  The colour vanished from the solidifying bloom ...  It was ashen, black.  The hammering continued.

A sense of the vast and antique simplicity of the forging, a feeling of hammering the earth itself into the superior purposes of man, enveloped Howat.  He forgot for the moment his companion, lost in a swelling pride of Myrtle Forge, of his father’s fibre—­the iron of his character like the iron he successfully wrought.  He could grasp Gilbert Penny’s accomplishment here, take fire at its heroic quality; a thing he found impossible in the counting room above, recording such trivial details as wool stockings for Jonas Rupp.  He could be a forgeman, he thought, but never a clerk; and in that limitation he realized that he was inferior to his father.  There were aspects of himself beyond such discipline and control.

Ludowika Winscombe grasped his arm.  “Come away,” she begged; “it’s—­it’s savage, like Vulcan and dreadful, early legends.”  She hurried him, clinging to his arm, over the ascent to the orderly lawn, the tranquil shine of candle-lit windows.  There, with her hood fallen from her head, she sat on a stone step.