He stood outside with his head bare and his face lifted to the cool shock of the rain.  Ludowika was muffled in her cloak.  Howat could see a renewed activity in the cast house; a group of men were gathered about the furnace hearth, in which he saw Thomas Gilkan.  He moved forward to call the latter; but a tapping was in progress, and he was forced to wait.  Gilkan swung a long bar against a low, clay face, and instantly the murky interior was ablaze with a crackling radiance against which the tense figures wavered in magnified silhouettes.  The metal poured out of the furnace in a continuous, blinding white explosion hung with fans of sparkling gold; the channels of the pig bed rapidly filled with the fluid iron.

Finally Howat Penny lifted Ludowika to her saddle and swung himself up at her side.  The rain had stopped; below the eastern rim of cloud an expanse showed serenely clear.  Their horses soberly took the rise beyond Shadrach Furnace and merged into the gathering dusk of the forest road.  A deep tranquillity had succeeded the tempest of Howat’s emotions; it would not continue, he knew; already the pressure of immense, new difficulties gathered about him; but momentarily he ignored them.  He searched his feelings curiously.

The fact that struck him most sharply was that he was utterly without remorse for what had occurred; it had been inevitable.  He experienced none of the fears against which Ludowika had exclaimed.  He lingered over no self-accusations, the reproach of adultery.  He was absolutely unable then to think of Felix Winscombe except as a person generally unconcerned.  If he repeated silently the term husband it was without any sense of actuality; the satirical individual in the full bottomed wig, now absent in Maryland, had no importance in the passionate situation that had arisen between Ludowika and himself.  Felix Winscombe would of course have to be met, dealt with; but so would a great many other exterior conditions.

Ludowika, in her linen mask, was enigmatic, a figure of mystery.  A complete silence continued between them; at times they ambled with his hand on her body; then the inequalities of the road forced them apart.  The clouds dissolved, the sky was immaculate, green, with dawning stars like dim white flowers.  A faint odour of the already mouldering year rose from the wet earth.  Suddenly Ludowika dragged the mask from her face.  Quivering with intense feeling she cried: 

“I’m glad, Howat!  Howat, I’m glad!”

He contrived to put an arm about her, crush her to him for a precarious moment.  “We have had an unforgettable day out of life,” she continued rapidly; “that is something.  It has been different, strangely apart, from all the rest.  The rain and that musty little store house and the wonderful iron; a memory to hold, carry away—­”

“To carry where?” he interrupted.  “You must realize that I’ll never let you go now.  I will keep you if we have to go beyond the Endless Mountains.  I will keep you in the face of any man or opposition created.”