He met Ludowika almost immediately; she advanced more simply dressed than he had ever seen her before.  She pointed downward to the water flashing over the great, turning wheel.  “Couldn’t we walk along the rill?  There’s a path, and it’s beautiful in the shadow.”  The stream poured solid and green through the narrow, masoned course of the forebay, sweeping in a lucent arc over the lip of the fall.  An earthen path followed the artificial channel through a dense grove of young maples, seeming to hold the sun in their flame-coloured foliage.  Myrtle Forge was lost, the leaves shut out the sky; underfoot some were already dead.  The wilderness marched up to the edges of the meagre clearings.

Ludowika walked ahead, without speech; irregular patches of ruddy light slid over her flared skirt.  Suddenly she stopped with an exclamation; the trees opened before them on the broad Canary sweeping between flat rocks, banks bluely green.  Above, the course was broken, swift; but where they stood it was tranquil again, and crystal clear.  Yellow rays plunging through the unwrinkled surface gilded the pebbles on the shallower bottom.  A rock, broad and flat, extended into the stream by the partial, diagonal dam that turned the water into Myrtle Forge; and Ludowika found a seat with her slippers just above the current.  Howat Penny sat beside her, then dropped back on the rocks, his hands clasped behind his head.

A silence intensified by the whispering stream enveloped them.  He watched a hawk, diminutive on the pale immensity above.  “Heavens,” Ludowika finally spoke, “how wonderful ... just to sit, not to be bothered by—­by things.  Just to hear the water.  Far away,” she said dreamily; “girl.”

From where he lay he could see her arms, beautiful and bare, lost in soft Holland above the elbows; he could see the roundness of her body above the lowest of stays.  Suddenly she fascinated him; he visualized her sharply, as though for the first time—­a warm, intoxicating entity.  He was profoundly disturbed, and sat erect; the stream, the woods, blurred in his vision.  He felt as if his heart had been turned completely over in his body; the palms of his hands were wet.  He had a momentary, absurd impulse to run, beyond Shadrach Furnace, beyond any distance he had yet explored, farther even than St. Xavier.  Ludowika Winscombe gazed in serene, unconscious happiness before her.  He felt that his face was crimson, and he rose, moved to the water’s edge, his back toward her.  He was infuriated at a trembling that passed over him, damned it in a savage and inaudible whisper.

What particularly appalled him was the fact that his overmastering sensation came without the slightest volition of his own.  He had had nothing to do with it, his will was powerless.  He was betrayed like a fortified city whose gate had been thrown open by an unsuspected, a concealed, traitor inside.  In an instant he had been invaded, his being levelled, his peculiar pride overthrown.  He thought even that he heard a dull crash, as if something paramount had irremediably fallen, something that should have been maintained at any cost, until the end of life.