then Ludowika
stepped back with her cloak sliding from her shoulders. She rested
against precarious steps leading aloft through a square opening in the
ceiling. "For storage," he said again. He thought his throat had closed,
and that he must suffocate. A mechanical impulse to show her what was
above set his foot upon the lower step, and he caught her waist. "You
see," he muttered; "things for the store ... the men, wool stockings,
handkerchiefs ... against their pay." The drumming rain was scarcely a
foot above their heads; an acrid and musty odour rose from the boxes and
canvas-sewed bales about the walls. "Ludowika," Howat said. He
stopped--she had shut her eyes. All that was Howat Penny, that was
individually sentient, left him with a pounding rush.

A faint sound, infinitely far removed, but insistent, penetrated his
blurred senses. It grew louder; rain, rain beating on the roof. Voices,
somewhere, outside. Ringing blows on an anvil, a blacksmith, and horses
waiting. Myrtle Forge. Ludowika. Ludowika Winscombe. No, by God, never
that last again!

He stood outside with his head bare and his face lifted to the cool
shock of the rain. Ludowika was muffled in her cloak. Howat could see a
renewed activity in the cast house; a group of men were gathered about
the furnace hearth, in which he saw Thomas Gilkan. He moved forward to
call the latter; but a tapping was in progress, and he was forced to
wait. Gilkan swung a long bar against a low, clay face, and instantly
the murky interior was ablaze with a crackling radiance against which
the tense figures wavered in magnified silhouettes. The metal poured out
of the furnace in a continuous, blinding white explosion hung with fans
of sparkling gold; the channels of the pig bed rapidly filled with the
fluid iron.

Finally Howat Penny lifted Ludowika to her saddle and swung himself up
at her side. The rain had stopped; below the eastern rim of cloud an
expanse showed serenely clear. Their horses soberly took the rise beyond
Shadrach Furnace and merged into the gathering dusk of the forest road.
A deep tranquillity had succeeded the tempest of Howat's emotions; it
would not continue, he knew; already the pressure of immense, new
difficulties gathered about him; but momentarily he ignored them. He
searched his feelings curiously.

The fact that struck him most sharply was that he was utterly without
remorse for what had occurred; it had been inevitable. He experienced
none of