The horses footed abreast over the road that crossed the hills and forded the watered swales between Myrtle Forge and the Furnace.  Ludowika, riding astride, enveloped and hooded in bottle green, had her face muffled in a linen riding mask.  He wondered vainly what expression she bore.  Speech he found unexpectedly difficult.  His passion mounted and mounted within him, all his being swept unresistingly in its tide.  Howat said at last: 

“Are you still so angry at life, at yourself?”

“No,” she replied; “I slept that foolishness away.  I must have sounded like a character in The Lying Valet.” Her present mood obscurely troubled him; he infinitely preferred her in the pale crumpled silk and candle light of the evening before.  “I wish I could tell you what I feel,” he said moodily.

“Why not?” she replied.  “It’s the most amusing thing possible.  You advance and I seem to retreat; you reach forward and grasp—­my fan, a handful of petticoat; you protest and sulk—­”

“Perhaps in Vauxhall,” he interrupted her savagely, “but not here, not like that, not with me.  This is not a gavotte.  I didn’t want it; I tried to get away; but it, you, had me in a breath.  At once it was all over.  God knows what it is.  Call it love.  It isn’t a thing under a hedge, I tell you that, for an hour.  It’s stronger than anything else that will ever touch me, it will last longer....  Like falling into a river.  Perhaps I’m different, a black Penny, but what other men take like water, a woman, is brandy for me.  I’m—­I’m not used to it.  I haven’t wanted Kate here and Mary there; but only you.  I’ve got to have you,” he said with a marked simplicity.  “I’ve got to, or there will be a bad smash.”

Ludowika rode silently, hid in her mask.  He urged his horse closer to her, and laid a hand on her swaying shoulder.  “I didn’t choose this,” he repeated; “the blame’s somewhere else.”  He felt a tremor run through her.  “Why say blame?” she finally answered.  “I hate moralities and excuses and tears.  If you are set on being gloomy, and talking to heaven about damnation, take it all away from me.”  A shadow moved across the countryside, and he saw clouds rising out of the north.  A sudden wind swept through the still forest, and immediately the air was aflame with rushing autumn leaves.  They fell across Howat’s face and eddied about the horses’ legs.  The grey bank deepened in space, the sun vanished; the wind was bleak.  It seemed to Howat Penny that the world had changed, its gold stricken to dun and gaunt branches, in an instant.  The road descended to the clustered stone houses about Shadrach Furnace.