He wrote, through Stephen Jannan, to Essie Scofield that afternoon, stating the generous terms of his final arrangement with her, making it plain that all personal contact between them had reached an end.  Hereafter she must exclusively address any unavoidable communications to Mr. Jannan.  She disregarded this in a direct, inevitably complaining, laborious scrawl.  However, he could read through it her obvious relief at complete independence.  She would, she thought, stay where she was for a little ... a period of perfunctory sentimentality followed.  He destroyed the letter, turning with deep pleasure to the message from Graham Jannan that he would bring Susan Brundon and Mary to Myrtle Forge the following day.

His mother, with Amity Merken like a timid and reduced replica at her back, greeted the Jannans and Miss Brundon at the door.  Jasper Penny came forward from the smoking room, to the right of the main entrance; where the men retired for an appetizer of gin and bitters.  The older man was garbed with exact care.  His whiskers were closely trimmed on either side of his severe mouth and shapely, dominant chin; and his sombre eyes, under their brows drawn up toward the temples, held an unusual raillery.  Amity Merken, he learned, had desired to stay away from the supper table; but, to her distress, he forced her into a chair set by himself.  Susan sat at the other end of the table, in the place that had been Phebe’s.  He gazed at her with a satisfaction without surprise; for it seemed to him that the woman beyond him had always occupied the fore of his existence.  She wore pale grey, the opening at her neck filled with soft lace and pinned with a garnet brooch, and a deep-fringed, white silk shawl.  The conversation was ambling, but, to Jasper Penny, pitched in a key of utter delight.  He said little through supper; and, at its end, with Graham Jannan, immediately followed the others into the parlour.

There Mary Jannan repeated her songs, French, English and Italian; and Jasper Penny listened with a poignant, emotional response.  Graham and his wife had arranged to sleigh back to Shadrach Furnace that evening; but Susan Brundon was to stay at Myrtle Forge, and take the train from Jaffa to-morrow.  The Jannans, finally, departed; and Jasper Penny, showing Susan through the chambers of the lower floor, succeeded in delaying her, seated, in the smoking room.

XVII

Now that the moment which he had so carefully planned had arrived he was curiously reluctant to precipitate Susan and himself into the future.  The lamps on a mantel, hooded in alabaster, cast a diffused radiance over Susan’s silvery dress, on her countenance faintly flushed above the white folds of the shawl.  “What is that sound?” she suddenly queried.  “I heard it all through supper and before.  It seems to live in the walls, the very air, here.”

“The trip hammer of Myrtle Forge,” he replied gravely.  “I suppose it might, fancifully, be called the beating of the Penny heart; it does pound through every associated stone; and I have a notion that when it stops we shall stop too.  The Penny men have all been faithful to it, and it has been faithful to us, given us a hold in a new country, a hold of wrought iron.”