Suddenly the Italian servant appeared absolutely noiselessly at her side, speaking a ridiculous, oily gibberish.  “At once,” she replied.  She turned to Howat.  “My bed has been prepared.  Are you going to-morrow?”

“No,” he answered awkwardly.  She turned and left without further words.  The servant walked behind her, resembling an unnatural shadow.

The metallic clamour at the anvil rose and fell, diminished by the interposed bulk of the dwellings, ceaselessly forging the Penny iron, the Penny gold.  He thought of himself as metal under the hammer; or rather ore at the furnace:  he hadn’t run clear in the casting; there were bubbles, bubbles and slag.  Endless refinements—­first the furnace and then the forge and then the metal.  A contempt for the lesser degrees possessed him, for a flawed or clumsy forging, for weakness of the flesh, the fatality of easy surrender.  An overwhelming, passionate emotion swept him to his feet, clenched his hands, filled him with a numbing desire to reach the last purification.

The mood sank into an inexplicable nostalgia; he dragged the back of a hand impatiently across his vision.  His persistent indifference, the inhibition that held him in a contemptuous isolation, again possessed him, Howat, a black Penny.  A last trace of his emotion, caught in the flood of his paramount disdain, vanished like a breath of warm mist.  He entered the house and mounted to his room; the stairs creaked but that was the only sound audible within.  His candles burned without their protecting glasses in smooth, unwavering flames.  When they were extinguished the darkness flowed in and blotted out familiar objects, folded him in a cloak of invisibility, obliterated him in sleep.  As he lost consciousness he heard the trip hammer dully beating out Penny iron, Penny gold; beating out, too, the Penny men ...  Slag and metal and ruffled muslin, roman candles and stars.

V

There came to him in the counting house, the following afternoon, rumours and echoes of the day’s happenings.  David Forsythe had arrived after dinner, and there had been word from Mr. Winscombe; he would be obliged to return to Maryland, and trusted that Ludowika would not be an onerous charge.  David was to take Myrtle and Caroline back with him to the city, for an exemplary Quaker party.  “There’s no good asking you,” he told Howat, lounging in the door of the counting room.  David was flushed, his sleeve coated with dust.  “Caroline,” he exclaimed, “is as strong as a forgeman; she upset me on the grass as quickly as you please, hooked her knee behind me, and there I was.  She picked me up, too, and laughed at me,” he stopped, lost in thought.  “Myrtle’s really beautiful,” he said again; “Caroline’s not a thing to look at, and yet, do you know, a—­a man looks at her.  She is wonderfully graceful.”