He lifted up both his hands and closed them with a quivering, relentless force.

“Truly,” Isabel Penny remarked, “truly I begin to be sorry for her.  There is something she has yet to learn about men.  Nothing can be said; and that is what your father will not penetrate.  Howat, I am even a little afraid ... now.  That, I believe, is unusual for me.  It’s your blackness, like powder.  The explosion can kill.  Nothing may be said.  Life drags us along by the hair.”

Her questions about Ludowika joined to the memory of the latter’s revulsion from the primitive conditions of the Province and added to the heaviness of his heart.  He mentally denied his mother’s suggestions, drove them from him, but they left a faint enduring sting, a vague unrest.  His passion for Ludowika swelled, dominated, him; he forgot everything but his own, supreme desire.  Nothing else stood before its flood; all thought of Ludowika’s final happiness was lost with the other detritus.  The tense closing of his hands had symbolized his feeling, his intent.  He held her in a manner as nakedly primitive as the inchoate sexuality of the emotion that had engulfed him.

Ludowika did not appear for supper, and he was possessed by a misery of vague apprehensions.  He must know something of her thoughts, have a token from her of some feeling like his own; and, waiting, he stopped the Italian on the stairs.  The latter knew his purpose immediately, without a spoken word; and he followed Howat’s brusque gesture to his room.  He hastily wrote a note; and the latter brought him back a reply, only partly satisfactory, with an air of relish.  For the first time the affair had the hateful appearance of an intrigue, like a court adventure.  It was the Italian servant, Howat decided; and immediately he recognized why he disliked the other—­it was because he expressed an aspect of slyness that lay over Ludowika and himself.  He put that from him, too; but it was like brushing away cobwebs.  His hunger for Ludowika increased all the while; it became more burningly material, insatiable and concrete.

On the day following she clung to him, when opportunity offered, with a desperate energy of emotion.  “You must hold me tighter,” she told him.  Her mood rapidly changed, and she complained of the eternal, pervasive fall of the forge hammer.  “It will drive me mad,” she declared almost wildly.  “I can’t bear to think of its going on and on, year after year; listening to it—­” He heard her with sombre eyes.  She had come to the counting house, empty for the moment but for themselves, and stood with her countenance shadowed by a frown.  “If the hammer stops,” he replied, waving his hand largely, “all this, the Pennys, stop, too.  I’m afraid that sound of beating out iron will be always wrought through our lives.  You will get accustomed to it—­”