The horses were left under the shed of the smithy at the primitive cross roads.  Thomas Gilkan had gone to the river about a purchase of casting sand, but expected to be back for the evening run of metal.  Fanny was away, Howat learned, visiting Dan Hesa’s family.  They would, of course, have dinner at the Heydricks; and the latter sent a boy home to prepare his wife.  Ludowika and Howat aimlessly followed the turning road that mounted to the coal house.  A levelled and beaten path, built up with stone, led out to the top of the stack, where a group of sooty figures were gathered about the clear, almost smokeless flame of the blast.  Below they lingered on the grassy edge of the stream banked against the hillside and flooding smoothly to the clamorous fall and revolving wheel by the wood shed that covered the bellows.  Pointed downward the latter spasmodically discharged a rush of air with a vast creasing of their dusty leather.  A procession of men were wheeling and dumping slag into a dreary area beyond.  There was a stir of constant life about the Furnace, voices calling, the ringing of metal on metal, the creak of barrows, dogs barking.  The plaintive melody of a German song rose on the air.

Behind a blood red screen of sumach Howat again kissed Ludowika.  Her arms tightened about his neck; she raised her face to him with an abandon that blinded him to the world about, and his entire being was drawn in an agony of desire to his lips.  She sank limply into his rigid embrace, a warm sensuous burden with parted lips.

At the Heydricks he ate senselessly whatever was placed before him.  The house, solidly built of grey stone traced with iron, had two rooms on the lower floor.  The table was set before a fireplace that filled the length of the wall, its mantel a great, roughly squared log mortared into the stones on either side.  Small windows opened through deep embrasures, a door bound with flowering, wrought hinges faced the road, and a narrow flight of stairs, with a polished rail and white post, led above.  Mrs. Heydrick, a large woman in a capacious Holland apron and worsted shoes, moved about the table with steaming pewter trenchards while Heydrick and their guests dined.

Howat Penny’s face burned as if from a violent fever; his veins, it seemed, were channels through which ran burning wine.  He was deafened by the tumult within him.  Heydrick’s voice sounded flat and blurred.  They were conscious at Shadrach of the thin quality of the last metal.  The charge had been poorly made up; he, Heydrick, had said at once, when the cinders had come out black, that the lime had been short.  His words fled through Howat’s brain like racing birds; the latter’s motions were unsteady, inexact.