When Felix Winscombe came back!

He was, too, increasingly aware of his mother’s scrutiny.  Howat was certain that Isabel Penny had surmised a part of his feeling for Ludowika.  He didn’t greatly care; any one might know, he thought contemptuously.  It had destroyed his sympathetic feeling for his mother, the only considerate bond that had existed with his family.  Unconsciously he placed her on one side of a line, the other held only Ludowika and himself.

He explained this to her in a sere reach of the garden.  It was afternoon, the sun low and a haze on the hills.  Ludowika had on a scarlet wrap, curiously vivid against the withered, brown aspect of the faded flower stems.  “You and me,” he repeated.  She gazed, without answering, at the barrier of hills that closed in Myrtle Forge.  From the thickets came the clear whistling of partridges, intensifying the unbroken tranquillity that surrounded the habitations.  Howat was suddenly conscious of the pressure of vast, unguessed regions, primitive forces, illimitable wildernesses.  It brought uppermost in him a corresponding zest in the sheer spaciousness of the land, a feeling always intensified by the thought of England.  “The Province,” he said disjointedly, “a place for men.  Did you see those that followed the road this morning?  Perhaps five with their women, some pack horses, kitchen tins and hide tents.  The men wore buckskin, and furred caps, and the women’s skirts were sewed leather.  One was tramping along with a feeding baby.  Well, God knows where they have been, how many days they have walked; their shoes were in shreds.  And their faces, thin and serious, have looked steadily over rifles at death.  The women, too.  You’ll only get them here, in a big country, a new—­”

“They were terrible,” Ludowika declared; “savage.  I was glad when they were by.  The baby at the woman’s great breast!” she shuddered at the memory.  “Like animals.”

He gazed at her with a slight surprise; he had never heard her speak so bitterly.  He saw her more clearly than ever before; as if her words had illuminated her extraordinary delicacy of being, had made visible all the infinite refinements of which she was the result.  He had a recurrence of his sense of her incongruity here, balanced on polished black pattens, against the darkening hills.  The sun disappeared, there was a cool flare of yellow light, and a feeling of impending evening.  The hills were indigo, the forest a dimmer gold, a wind moved audible in the dry leaves.

Ludowika gasped.  “It’s so—­so huge,” she said, “all the lonely miles.  At times I can’t bear to think of it.”  A faint dread invaded him.  “Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, a thing howled in the woods.  And I got thinking of those naked men at the Forge, with their eyes rimmed in black, and—­and—­”

He disregarded the publicity of their position and put an arm about her shoulders, in an overwhelming impulse to calm and reassure her; but she slipped away.  “I’ll be all right again,” she promised; “but I think it’s more cheerful with the candles.  We’ll get your sister to play Belshazzar and pretend we’re across the green from St. James.”