“What does he say about returning?” Howat bluntly asked.

“Shortly, he hopes; that is, in another ten days.  He says there is a good ship, the Lindamira, by the middle of November.”  Howat said, “Excellent.”  Ludowika gazed at him swiftly.  “It will be difficult.”  His face became grim, but he made no direct reply.  A silence fell on the room through which vibrated the blows of the trip hammer at the Forge.  The day was grey and definitely cold; a small cannon stove glowed in the counting house; but Ludowika kept mostly to her room.  She sent him a note by the Italian, and Howat eyed the fellow bowing in the doorway.  A flexibility that seemed entirely without bones.  His eyes were jet slits, his lips shaven and mobile; a wig was repulsively saturated with scented grease.  Yet it was not in actual details that he oppressed Howat; but by the vague suggestion of debasing commendations, of surreptitious understanding, insinuations.  He seemed, absurdly, unreal, a symbol the intent of which Howat missed; he suppressed an insane movement to touch the Italian, discover if he was actually before him.

He reread Ludowika’s note whenever he was not actually employed in recording, until he was obliged to conceal it in the Forge book.

Later Abner Forsythe arrived with David, and there was a stir of preparing rooms and communication with the farm.  David’s mother was dead, and Abner conducted the wedding negotiations with the Pennys.  “I thought it would be the pretty little one,” he said at the table, with a Quaker disregard of small niceties of feeling; “but, Gilbert, any girl of yours would be more than the young men of the present deserve.”  It was a difficult conversation for every one but Ludowika and Abner Forsythe.  A greater ease appeared after supper.  David and Caroline disappeared in the direction of the clavichord, from which sounded some scattered, perfunctory measures.  The two elder men returned, over a decanter of French spirits, to the inevitable and engrossing subject of iron and the Crown regulations; Myrtle sat stiffly before the fireplace with Isabel Penny; and Howat moved up and across the room, his gaze lying on Ludowika, spread in an expanse of orange chiffon and bold silver tracery on the small sofa.

She smiled at him once, but, for the most part, she was lost in revery.  Ludowika had a fan, to hold against the fire; and her white fingers were playing with its polished black sticks and glazed paper printed with an ornamental bar of music.  A faint colour stained her cheeks as he watched her, and set his heart tumultuously beating.  He told himself over and over, with an unabated sense of wonder, that she was his.  He longed for the moment when they could discard all pretence and be frankly, completely, together.  That must happen after Felix Winscombe arrived.  Meanwhile he was forced to content himself with a look, a quick or lingering contact of fingers, the crush of her body against his momentarily in a passage.  They had returned once to the rock where he had first been intoxicated by her; in a strangling wave of emotion he had taken her into his arms; but she had broken away.  The width of the stream and screen of trees had apparently disconcerted Ludowika, and she contrived to make him feel inexcusably young, awkward.