It was incredible that the sufferer’s agony should increase, but it was apparent that it did remorselessly.  All humanity was obliterated in an excruciating spasm over which streamed some meagre tears.  Mr. Winscombe’s arms raised and dropped; and, suddenly relaxed, he slipped down upon the pillows.  Immediately the torment vanished from his countenance; it became peaceful, released.  The familiar mockery of the mouth came back.  The head, slightly turned, seemed to regard Ludowika with contentment and interrogation.  Howat was conscious of a relief almost as marked as that on the face before him.  He had gripped his hands until they ached.  The tension in the room, too, seemed spent.  He was about to address a reassuring period to Ludowika, when, at a glimpse of her expression, the words died on his lips.

He bent over the bed, with his hand on a ridged, still chest; he gazed down at flaccid eyes, a dropped chin.  Felix Winscombe was dead.

Howat raised up slowly, facing the woman through the draperies.  She was gazing in an incredulous, shocked surprise at the limp, prostrate body capped in black gros de Naples.  A shuddering fear passed over her, and then her eyes met those of Howat Penny.  Even separated from him by the bed she drew away as if from his touch.  He saw that she had forgotten the dead man in a sharp realization of the portent of the living.  She glanced about the room in the panic of a trapped lark, an abject fright, searching for an escape.

He realized that there was none; Ludowika now belonged to him absolutely; he was as remorseless as the pain that had killed Felix Winscombe.  Below the automatic sensations of the moment Howat was conscious of utter satisfaction.  A miracle had given Ludowika to him; in the passing of a breath all his difficulty had been ended.  She was alone with him in a province of forests and iron and stars.  He would make her forget the gardens of fireworks and scraping violins; but forget or not she was his ...  Ludowika Penny.

II THE FORGE

X

Jasper Penny stood at a window of his bed room, his left arm carried in a black silk handkerchief, gazing down at the long, low roof of Myrtle Forge, built by his great, great grandfather Gilbert over a hundred and ten years before.  It was February, and he could hear the ringing blows of axes, cutting the ice out of the forebay to liberate the water power for the completion of a forging of iron destined to be rolled into tracks for the slowly lengthening Columbia Steam Railway System.  It was midday, a grey sky held a brighter, diffused radiance where the veiled sun hung without warmth, and the earth was everywhere frozen granite-like.  He could see beyond the Forge shed heaped charcoal, and the black mass seemed no more dead than the ground or bare, brittle trees sweeping down and up to where, on encircling hills, they were lifted sharply against the cloudy monotony.