“I am an imbecile; only it came so suddenly.  You would laugh at me if you knew what I was thinking.  I can even manage a smile at myself.”  She appeared older, the Mrs. Winscombe who had first come to Myrtle Forge; her mouth was flippant.  “The eternal Suzanna,” she remarked, “the monotonous elders or younger.”  He paid little heed to her words; the coldness, the indifference, were fast leaving him.  His heart was like the trip hammer at the Forge.  Yellow wine.  He was still standing above her, and he took her hands in his.  She put up her face with a movement of bravado, of mockery, which he ignored.

“I didn’t choose it,” he told her; “it’s ruined all that I was.  Now, I don’t care; there is nothing else.  One thing you are wrong about—­if there had been another in your life like myself you wouldn’t be here with—­as you are.  I’m certain of that.  It’s the only thing I do know.  My feeling may be a terrible misfortune; I didn’t make it; I can’t see the end.  There isn’t any, I think.”  He pressed her hands to his throat with a gesture that half dragged her from the sofa.  A deeper colour stained her cheeks, and her breath caught.  “Endless,” he repeated, losing the word on her lips.  She wilted into a corner of the sofa, and he strode over to the fire, stood gazing blindly at the pulsating embers.  Howat returned to her almost immediately, but she made no sign of his nearness.  The bitterness had left her face, she appeared weary, pallid; she sat heedlessly crumpling her flounces, a hand bent back on its wrist.

“I think it is something in myself,” she said presently; “something a little wrong that I’m dreadfully tired of.  Always men.  Out here a Howat Penny, just like any fribble about the Court.  God, I’d like to be that girl across the road, in the barnyard.”  He was back at the fire again when Gilbert Penny entered the room.  The latter dropped a palm on Howat’s shoulder.

“Schwar says the last sow metal was faulty,” he declared; “the Furnace’ll need some attention with Abner Forsythe deeper in the Provincial affairs.  Splendid thing David’s back.  Look for a lot from David.”  Howat hoped desperately that Ludowika would not leave, go to her room, while his father was talking.  “David says you have an understanding, will do great things.  I hope so.  I hope so.  I won’t damn him as an example but he will do you no harm.  That is, if he touches your confounded person at all.  A black Penny, Mrs. Winscombe,” he said, turning to the figure spread in pale silk on the sofa.  “Fortunate for you to have no such confounded, stubborn lot on your hands.  Although,” he added laughingly, “Felix Winscombe’s no broken reed.  But this boy of mine—­you might think he had been run out of Shadrach,” he tapped a finger on Howat’s back.  “Not like those fellows about the Court, anyway.  They tell me he’ll go fifty miles through the woods in a day.  Now if we could only keep that at the iron trade—­”