I was in it when I was fourteen, and I had a lover the first year.  He showed me how to make pleasure.  Don’t think that I was indifferent to this,” she added directly; “that I wanted to escape it.  I wasn’t; I didn’t.  Only beneath everything I had a feeling of not being completely satisfied; I wanted—­oh, not very strongly—­something else, for an hour.  At times the air seemed choking; and inside of me, but not in my body, I seemed choking too.  I used to think about the Polish forests, and that would help a little.”

She resumed the place at his side, with her silk billowing against his knee.  “This is it,” she declared, her face set against the illimitable, still dark.  “I recognized it only a little while ago.  I think unconsciously I came to America hoping to find it; there was nothing at Annapolis, but here—­” she drew a breath as deep, he noted, as her stays would permit.  “It includes you, somehow,” she continued; “as if you were the voice.  What I said coming away from the Forge, about dreading you, was only momentary.  I have another feeling, premonition—­” she broke off, her manner changed.  “All the Court believes in signs:  Protestantism and vampires.

“It seems unreal here; I mean St. James and all that was so tremendously important; incredibly stupid—­the Princess Amelia’s stockings.  But you can’t imagine the jealousy.  Every bit of it shall go out of my thoughts.  You’ll help me, a harmless magic.  I’ll be as simple as that girl across the road, with the red cheeks, in a single slip.  You must call me Ludowika; Ludowika and Howat.  I’m not so terribly old, only twenty-nine.”

“I am going away to-morrow,” he informed her; “I won’t be back before you leave.”

A slight frown gathered about her eyes.  Her face was very close to his.  “But I don’t like that either,” she replied.  “You were to be a part of it, its voice; excursions in the woods.  Is it necessary, your absence?”

He knew that it was not; and suddenly he was seized with the conviction that he would not go.  It was as if, again, a voice outside him had informed him of the fact.  But if there were no reason for his going there was as little for his remaining at Myrtle Forge; that was, so far as Ludowika Winscombe was concerned.  He had been untouched by all that she had said; untouched except for a faint involuntary shiver as she had spoken of premonition.  And that had vanished instantaneously.  There was his duty in the counting house.  But he was forced to admit to himself the insufficiency of that reason; it was too palpably false.

He had not been moved by the intent of what she had said, but his imagination had been stirred, as if by the touch of delicate, pointed fingers, at her description of Court—­a bed with a silk counterpane ... behind clipped greenery.  He recalled the fan with its painted Villeggiatura, the naked, wanton loves.  “Something different,” she half repeated, with a sigh, an accent, of longing.  Howat heard her with impatience; it was absurd to try to picture her tramping in the wilderness, breaking her way hour after hour through thorned underbrush, like Fanny Gilkan.  She wouldn’t progress a hundred yards in her unsteady pattens and fragile clothes.