He had kissed her as a formal declaration; what must come would come. "I was an imbecile," she spoke in a voice at once listless and touched with bitterness; "Arcadia," she laughed. "I thought it was different here, that you were different; that feeling in my heart—but it's gone now, dead. I suppose I should thank you. But, do you know, I regret it; I would rather have stayed at St. James all my life and kept that single little delusion, longing. The premonition was nonsense, too; nothing new, unexpected, can happen. Kisses are almost the oldest things in the world, kisses and their results. What is there to be afraid of? You see, I learned it all quite young.
"I am an imbecile; only it came so suddenly. You would laugh at me if you knew what I was thinking. I can even manage a smile at myself." She appeared older, the Mrs. Winscombe who had first come to Myrtle Forge; her mouth was flippant. "The eternal Suzanna," she remarked, "the monotonous elders or younger." He paid little heed to her words; the coldness, the indifference, were fast leaving him. His heart was like the trip hammer at the Forge. Yellow wine. He was still standing above her, and he took her hands in his. She put up her face with a movement of bravado, of mockery, which he ignored.
"I didn't choose it," he told her; "it's ruined all that I was. Now, I don't care; there is nothing else. One thing you are wrong about—if there had been another in your life like myself you wouldn't be here with—as you are. I'm certain of that. It's the only thing I do know. My feeling may be a terrible misfortune; I didn't make it; I can't see the end. There isn't any, I think." He pressed her hands to his throat with a gesture that half dragged her from the sofa. A deeper colour stained her cheeks, and her breath caught. "Endless," he repeated, losing the word on her lips. She wilted into a corner of the sofa, and he strode over to the fire, stood gazing blindly at the pulsating embers. Howat returned to her almost immediately, but she made no sign of his nearness. The bitterness had left her face, she appeared weary, pallid; she sat heedlessly crumpling her flounces, a hand bent back on its wrist.
"I think it is something in myself," she said presently; "something a little wrong that I'm dreadfully tired of. Always men. Out here a Howat Penny, just like any fribble about the Court. God, I'd like to be that girl across the road, in the barnyard." He was back at the fire again when Gilbert Penny entered the room. The latter dropped a palm on Howat's shoulder.
"Schwar says the last sow metal was faulty," he declared; "the Furnace'll need some attention with Abner Forsythe deeper in the Provincial affairs. Splendid thing David's back. Look for a lot from David." Howat hoped desperately that Ludowika would not leave, go to her room, while his father was talking. "David says you have an understanding, will do great things. I hope so. I hope so. I won't damn him as an example but he will do you no harm. That is, if he touches your confounded person at all. A black Penny, Mrs. Winscombe," he said, turning to the figure spread in pale silk on the sofa. "Fortunate for you to have no such confounded, stubborn lot on your hands. Although," he added laughingly, "Felix Winscombe's no broken reed. But this boy of mine—you might think he had been run out of Shadrach," he tapped a finger on Howat's back. "Not like those fellows about the Court, anyway. They tell me he'll go fifty miles through the woods in a day. Now if we could only keep that at the iron trade—"
His father went on insufferably, without end. Howat withdrew stiffly from the other's touch. Irresistibly he drifted back, back to Ludowika. She had not moved; her bent hand seemed dislocated. An immense tenderness for her overwhelmed him; his sheer passion vapourized into a poignant sweetness of solicitous feeling. He was protective; his jaw set rigidly, he enveloped her in an angry barrier from all the world. He had a sensation of standing at bay; in his mulberry damask, in brocade and silver buttons, he had an impression of himself stooped and savage, confronting a menacing dark with Ludowika flung behind him. Inexplicable tremors assailed him, vast fears. His father's deliberate voice destroyed the illusion; he saw the candles about him like white and yellow flowers, the suave interior. The others had returned. He heard Ludowika speaking; she laughed. His tension relaxed. Suddenly he was flooded with happiness, as if he had been drenched in sparkling, delightful water. He joined in the gay, trivial clamour that arose. Isabel Penny gazed at him speculatively.
There would, it appeared, be no other opportunity that evening for him to declare himself to Ludowika. He was vaguely conscious of his mother's scrutiny; he must avoid exposing Ludowika to any uncomfortable surmising. His thoughts leaped forward to a revelation that he began to feel was inevitable; he got even now a tangible pleasure from the consideration of an announcement of his passion for Ludowika Winscombe, a sheer insistence upon it in the face of an antagonistic world. But for the present he must be careful. This, the greatest event that had befallen him, summed up all that he innately was; it expressed him, a black Penny, absolutely; Howat felt the distance between himself, his convictions, and the convictions of the world, immeasurably widening. His feeling for Ludowika symbolized his isolation from the interwoven fabric of the plane of society; it gave at last a tangible bulk to his scorn.
As he had feared, presently she rose and went to her room. Myrtle took her place on the sofa. Gilbert Penny vanished with a broad witticism at the well known preference of youth, in certain situations, for its own council. David Forsythe made a wry face at Howat. Caroline gaily laid her arm across her mother's shoulder and propelled her from the room. David stood awkwardly in the middle of the floor; and Howat, hardly less clumsy, took his departure. He found Caroline awaiting him in the shadow of his door; she followed him and stood silent while he made a light. Her face was serious, and her hands clasped tightly. "Howat," she said in a small voice, "it's—it's, that is, David loves me. Whatever do you suppose father and Myrtle will say?"
"What do you think David is saying to Myrtle now?" he asked drily. "I am glad, Caroline; everything worked out straight for you. David is a damned good Quaker. For some others life isn't so easy." She laid a warm hand on his shoulder. "I wish you were happy, Howat." A slight irritation seized him at the facile manner in which she radiated her satisfaction, and he moved away. "David's going back to-night. I wish he wouldn't," she said troubled. "That long, dark way. Anything might happen. But he has simply got to be at his father's office in the morning. He is going to speak to him first, see what will be given us at the Furnace."
"It should be quite a family party at breakfast," Howat predicted.