t, extended into the stream by
the partial, diagonal dam that turned the water into Myrtle Forge; and
Ludowika found a seat with her slippers just above the current. Howat
Penny sat beside her, then dropped back on the rocks, his hands clasped
behind his head.

A silence intensified by the whispering stream enveloped them. He
watched a hawk, diminutive on the pale immensity above. "Heavens,"
Ludowika finally spoke, "how wonderful ... just to sit, not to be
bothered by--by things. Just to hear the water. Far away," she said
dreamily; "girl."

From where he lay he could see her arms, beautiful and bare, lost in
soft Holland above the elbows; he could see the roundness of her body
above the lowest of stays. Suddenly she fascinated him; he visualized
her sharply, as though for the first time--a warm, intoxicating entity.
He was profoundly disturbed, and sat erect; the stream, the woods,
blurred in his vision. He felt as if his heart had been turned
completely over in his body; the palms of his hands were wet. He had a
momentary, absurd impulse to run, beyond Shadrach Furnace, beyond any
distance he had yet explored, farther even than St. Xavier. Ludowika
Winscombe gazed in serene, unconscious happiness before her. He felt
that his face was crimson, and he rose, moved to the water's edge, his
back toward her. He was infuriated at a trembling that passed over him,
damned it in a savage and inaudible whisper.

What particularly appalled him was the fact that his overmastering
sensation came without the slightest volition of his own. He had had
nothing to do with it, his will was powerless. He was betrayed like a
fortified city whose gate had been thrown open by an unsuspected, a
concealed, traitor inside. In an instant he had been invaded, his being
levelled, his peculiar pride overthrown. He thought even that he heard a
dull crash, as if something paramount had irremediably fallen,
something that should have been maintained at any cost, until the end of
life.

Howat felt a sudden hatred of his companion; but that quickly
evaporated; he discovered that she had spread, like a drop of carmine in
a goblet of water, through his every nerve. By God, but she had become
himself! In the space of a breath she was in his blood, in his brain;
calling his hands about her, toward her smooth, beautiful arms. She was
the scent in his nostrils, the sound a breeze newly sprung up stirred
out of the leaves. A profound melancholy spread ove