New and different industrial combinations were locking together in great agglomerations of widely-separated activities; the human was superseded by the industrial machine, where men were efficient, subservient cogs in a cold and successful automaton of business.  A system of general credit was springing up; the old, old payments in kind, in iron or even meal and apparel, or gold, had given place to reciprocal understandings of deferred indebtedness.  The actual thousands of earlier commerce were replaced by theoretical millions.  His own realty, his personal property, because of such understandings, were outside computation.  They were, he knew, reckoned in surprising figures; but in a wide-spread panic, forced liquidation, the greater part of his wealth would break like straw.  It was the same with the entire country.

His thoughts returned to Susan, to the longing for the peace, the inviolable security, she would bring to the centre, the heart, of his life.  No material catastrophe could shape, deplete, her richness of spirit.  Fragile as she was, with her need of rest, her diffidence and pallor, she yet seemed to Jasper Penny the most—­the only—­secure thing in the world.  She defied, he murmured, death itself.  Wonderful.

He moved slowly to his sombre bed room, with its dark velour hangings and ponderous black walnut furniture, precisely scrolled with gilt.  The interior absorbed the light of a single lamp, robbing it of radiance.  A clock deliberately struck the hour with an audible whirring of the spring.  Jasper Penny took out from a drawer a tall, narrow ledger, its calf binding powdering in a yellow dust, with a blurring label, “Forgebook.  Myrtle Forge, 1750.”  He sat, opening it on the arm of an old Windsor reading chair he had insisted on retaining among the recent upholstery, and studied the entries, some written in a small script with ornamental capitals and red lined day headings, others in an abrupt manner with heavy down strokes.  The latter, he knew, had been made by his great grandfather, Howat.

“Jonas Rupp charged with three pair of woollen stockings ... shoes for Minnie.”  Howat had been young when Minnie’s shoes were new; twenty something—­five or six.  He must have married not long after.  Howat—­like himself—­a black Penny.  The special interest Jasper Penny felt for this particular ancestor grew so vivid that he almost felt the other’s presence in the room at his shoulder.  He consciously repressed the desire to turn suddenly and surprise the shadowy and yet clear figure in the gloom.  The features of the youth so long gone, and yet, too, he felt, the replica of his own young years, were plain; the dark eyes, slanted brows, the impatient mouth.