The future!  It was that, he now discovered, which occupied him, rather than the past.  A new need had become apparent, a restless desire analogous to the urge of seeking youth.  Jasper Penny was aware of a great dissatisfaction, a vast emptiness, in his existence; he had a feeling of waste growing out of the sense of hurrying years.  Somehow, obscurely, he had been cheated.  He almost envied the commonality of men, not, like himself, black Pennys, impatient of assuaging relationships and beliefs.  Yet this, too, turned into another phase of his inheritance—­his need was not material, concrete, it had no worldly, graspable implications, and his general contempt was not less but greater.  He wished to bring a final justification to his isolation rather than lose himself in the wide, undistinguished surge of living.

“You’ll stop at the Jannans?” his mother queried.

“I think not, probably Sanderson’s Hotel, Stephen is giving a ball to-night for Graham and his wife.  I have some important transactions.”  Not an echo of his affair with Essie Scofield had, he knew, penetrated to Myrtle Forge.  It was a most fortunate accident.  The vulgarity consequent upon discovery would have been unbearable.  Stephen Jannan, his cousin, a lawyer of wide city connections, must have learned something of the truth; but Stephen, properly, had said nothing; a comfortable obscurity had hid him from gabbled scandal.  Now, soon, it would all be over.  Unconsciously he drew a deeper breath of relief, of prospective freedom.

The Hecla, a wooden barrelled engine with a tall, hinged stack, drew its brigade of canary-coloured chariot cars forward with a rapid bumping over inequal rails.  Jasper Penny’s seat, number nineteen, was fortunately in the centre, close by the stove, where a warmth hung that failed to reach to the doors.  Lost in speculation the journey was both long and vague.  Twilight deepened within the car, and two flickering candles were lit at either end, their pallid light serving only to cast thin, climbing shadows over the rocking, box-like interior.  At irregular intervals the train stopped with a succession of subsiding crashes, and started again at the blowing of a horn; passengers would leave or enter; or it would prove to be merely a halt to take on cut and piled wood fuel for the engine.

Finally the train brigade reached the inclined plane leading to the river and city; the engine was detached, and the cars, fastened to a hemp cable, were lowered spasmodically to where a team of mules drew them through a gloomy, covered bridge echoing to the slow hoof falls and creaking of loose planks.  Jasper Penny fastened the elaborate frogs of his heavily furred overcoat over his injured arm, and with a florid bandanna wiped the cinders from his silk hat.