with you for speaking, then he
will realize more, and the trouble will follow. Are you certain that you
have comprehended? It would be stupid to mistake an episode, you would
succeed only in making yourself ridiculous."

He lifted up both his hands and closed them with a quivering, relentless
force.

"Truly," Isabel Penny remarked, "truly I begin to be sorry for her.
There is something she has yet to learn about men. Nothing can be said;
and that is what your father will not penetrate. Howat, I am even a
little afraid ... now. That, I believe, is unusual for me. It's your
blackness, like powder. The explosion can kill. Nothing may be said.
Life drags us along by the hair."

Her questions about Ludowika joined to the memory of the latter's
revulsion from the primitive conditions of the Province and added to the
heaviness of his heart. He mentally denied his mother's suggestions,
drove them from him, but they left a faint enduring sting, a vague
unrest. His passion for Ludowika swelled, dominated, him; he forgot
everything but his own, supreme desire. Nothing else stood before its
flood; all thought of Ludowika's final happiness was lost with the other
detritus. The tense closing of his hands had symbolized his feeling, his
intent. He held her in a manner as nakedly primitive as the inchoate
sexuality of the emotion that had engulfed him.

Ludowika did not appear for supper, and he was possessed by a misery of
vague apprehensions. He must know something of her thoughts, have a
token from her of some feeling like his own; and, waiting, he stopped
the Italian on the stairs. The latter knew his purpose immediately,
without a spoken word; and he followed Howat's brusque gesture to his
room. He hastily wrote a note; and the latter brought him back a reply,
only partly satisfactory, with an air of relish. For the first time the
affair had the hateful appearance of an intrigue, like a court
adventure. It was the Italian servant, Howat decided; and immediately he
recognized why he disliked the other--it was because he expressed an
aspect of slyness that lay over Ludowika and himself. He put that from
him, too; but it was like brushing away cobwebs. His hunger for Ludowika
increased all the while; it became more burningly material, insatiable
and concrete.

On the day following she clung to him, when opportunity offered, with a
desperate energy of emotion. "You must hold me tighter," she told him.
Her mood rapidly changed,