An opportunity occurred later.  Gilbert Penny had gone down to the Forge store, his wife had disappeared.  Ludowika Winscombe and Howat were seated in the drawing room.  Only a stand of candles was lit at her elbow; her face floated like a pale and lovely wafer against the billowing shadows of the chamber.  The wood on the iron hearth was charring without flame.  He questioned her bluntly, suddenly, out of a protracted silence.  She regarded him speculatively, delaying answer.  Then, “I couldn’t tell you like this, now; it would be too silly; you would laugh at me.  I hadn’t meant to say even what I did.  I’d prefer to ignore it.”

“What did you mean, what premonition came to you?” he insisted crudely.

She seemed to draw away from him, increase in years and an attitude of tolerant amusement.  Only an immediate reply would save them, he realized.  He leaned forward unsteadily, with clenched hands.  “I warned you,” she proceeded lightly; “and if you do laugh my pride will suffer.”  In spite of her obvious determination to speak indifferently her voice grew serious, “I had a feeling that you mustn’t kiss me, that this—­America, the Province, Myrtle Forge, you, were for something different.  You see, I had always longed for a peculiar experience, release, and when it came, miraculously, I thought, it must not be spoiled, turned into the old, old thing.  That was all.  It was in my spirit,” she added almost defiantly, as if that claim might too be susceptible of derision.

He settled back into his chair, turning upon her a gloomy vision.  Whatever penalty threatened them, he knew, must fall.  Nothing existing could keep him from it.  He felt a fleet sorrow for her in the inevitable destruction of the release for which she had so long searched, her new peace, so soon to be smashed.  All sorrow for himself had gone under.  Isabel Penny returned to the drawing room, and moved about, her flowered silk at once gay and obscure in the semidarkness.  “The fire, Howat,” she directed; “it’s all but out.”  He stirred the logs into a renewed blaze.

A warm gilding flickered over Ludowika; she smiled at him, relaxed, content.  He was surprised that she could not see the tumultuous feeling overpowering him.  He had heard that women were immediately aware of such emotion.  But he realized that she had been lulled into a false sense of security, of present immunity from “the old, old thing,” by her own placidity.  He did not know when his mother left the room.  He wondered continuously when it would happen, when the bolt would fall, what she would do.  Howat was hot and cold, and possessed by a subtle sense of improbity, a feeling resembling that of a doubtful advance through the dark, for a questionable end.  This was the least part of him, insignificant; his passion grew constantly stronger, more brutal.  In a last, vanishing trace of his superior consciousness he recognized that the thing must have happened to him as it did; it was the price of his more erect pride, his greater contempt, his solitary and unspent state.