“Very.”  Jannan replied to the last question first.  “Her children come from the best families in the city; and, under my advice, her charges are high.  She has a brother, I believe, a cotton merchant of New Orleans, and quite prosperous.  But he has a large family, and Susan will not permit him to deprive it of a dollar for her benefit.  As you say, she is not strong; but in spite of that she needs no man’s patronage.  The finest qualities, Jasper, the most elevated spirit.  A little too conscientious, perhaps; and, although she is thirty-nine, curiously ignorant of the world; but rare ... rare.  It almost seems as if there were a conspiracy to keep ugly truths away from her.”

Truths, Jasper Penny thought bitterly, such as had just been revealed in Stephen’s office.  There was, it seemed, nothing he could do for Susan Brundon.  He envied the lawyer his position of familiar adviser, the ease with which the other spoke her name:  Susan.  He rose, fumbling with a jade seal.  “Come, Eunice,” he said, the lines deepening about his mouth and eyes.  Stephen Jannan assisted him into the heavy, furred coat.  “Well, Jasper,” he remarked sympathetically, “if we could but look ahead, if we were older in our youth, yes, and younger in our increasing age, the world would be a different place.”  He held out to Eunice a newly minted Brazilian goldpiece.  “Good-bye,” he addressed her; “command me if I can be of any use.”  She clutched the gold tightly, and Jasper Penny led her out into the winter street.  “We must have dinner,” he said gravely.  “With some yellow rock candy,” she added, “and syllabubs.”

XVI

He returned to Myrtle Forge from New York with a mingled sense of pleasure and the feeling that his place was unsupportably empty.  The loneliness of which he had been increasingly conscious seemed to have its focus in his house.  The following morning he walked restlessly down the short, steep descent to the Forge, lying on its swift water diverted from Canary Creek.  Unlike a great many iron families of increasing prosperity, the Pennys had not erected the unsightly buildings of their manufacturing about the scene of their initial activity and mansion.  Jasper’s father, Daniel Barnes Penny, under whose hand their success had largely multiplied, had grouped their first rolling mill and small nail works by the canal at Jaffa, preserving the pastoral aspect of Myrtle Forge, with its farmland and small, ancient, stone buildings.

Jasper had only made some unimportant changes at the Forge itself—­the pigs were subjected to the working of two hearths now, the chafery, where the greater part of the sulphur was burned out, and the finery.  The old system of bellows had been replaced by a wood cylinder, compressing air by piston into a chamber from which the blast was regulated.  A blacksmith’s shed had been added in the course of time, and a brick coke oven.  He stopped at the Forge shed, filled with ruddy light and shadow, the ringing of hammers, and silently watched the malleable metal on the anvil.  Flakes of glowing iron fell, changing from ruby to blue and black.