d instinctively
he avoided the greater with the lesser; instinctively he realized that
the admission of cloying influences, of the entanglements of sex, would
more definitely bind him than any generality of society.

It had, he thought, grown dark with amazing rapidity. He could now see a
feeble light at the Gilkans, ahead and on the right. At the same moment
a brighter, flickering radiance fell upon the road, the thick foliage of
the trees. The blast was gathering at Shadrach Furnace. A clear, almost
smokeless flame rose from the stack against the night-blue sky. It
illuminated the rectangular, stone structure of the coal-house on the
hill, and showed the wet and blackened roof of the casting shed below.
The flame dwindled and then mounted, hanging like a fabulous oriflamme
on a stillness in which Howat Penny could hear the blast forced through
the Furnace by the great leather bellows.

He turned in, over the littered ground before the Gilkan house. Fanny
was standing in the doorway, her straight, vigorous body sharp against
the glow inside. "Here's Mr. Howat Penny," she called over her shoulder.
"Is everything off the table? There's not much," she turned to him, "but
the end of the pork barrel." A meagre fire was burning in the large,
untidy hearth; battered tin ovens had been drawn aside, and a pair of
wood-soled shoes were drying. The rough slab of the table, pushed back
against a long seat made of a partly hewed and pegged log, was empty
but for some dull scarred pewter and scraps of salt meat. On the narrow
stair that led above, a small, touselled form was sleeping--one of the
cast boys at the Furnace.

A thin, peering woman in a hickory-dyed wool dress moved forward
obsequiously. "Mr. Penny!" she echoed the girl's announcement; "and here
I haven't got a thing fit for you. Thomas Gilkan has been too busy to
get out, and Fanny she'll fetch nothing unless the mood's on her. If I
only had a fish I could turn over." She brushed the end of the table
with a frayed sleeve. "You might just take a seat, and I'll look
around."

Fanny Gilkan listened to her mother with a comprehending smile. Fanny's
face was gaunt, but her grey eyes were wide and compelling, her mouth
was firm and bright; and her hair, her father often said, resembled the
fire at the top of Shadrach. Howat knew that she was as impersonal, as
essentially unstirred, as himself; but he had a clear doubt of Mrs.
Gilkan. The latter was too anxious to welcome