htly turned, seemed to regard Ludowika
with contentment and interrogation. Howat was conscious of a relief
almost as marked as that on the face before him. He had gripped his
hands until they ached. The tension in the room, too, seemed spent. He
was about to address a reassuring period to Ludowika, when, at a glimpse
of her expression, the words died on his lips.

He bent over the bed, with his hand on a ridged, still chest; he gazed
down at flaccid eyes, a dropped chin. Felix Winscombe was dead.

Howat raised up slowly, facing the woman through the draperies. She was
gazing in an incredulous, shocked surprise at the limp, prostrate body
capped in black gros de Naples. A shuddering fear passed over her, and
then her eyes met those of Howat Penny. Even separated from him by the
bed she drew away as if from his touch. He saw that she had forgotten
the dead man in a sharp realization of the portent of the living. She
glanced about the room in the panic of a trapped lark, an abject
fright, searching for an escape.

He realized that there was none; Ludowika now belonged to him
absolutely; he was as remorseless as the pain that had killed Felix
Winscombe. Below the automatic sensations of the moment Howat was
conscious of utter satisfaction. A miracle had given Ludowika to him; in
the passing of a breath all his difficulty had been ended. She was alone
with him in a province of forests and iron and stars. He would make her
forget the gardens of fireworks and scraping violins; but forget or not
she was his ... Ludowika Penny.

II THE FORGE

X

Jasper Penny stood at a window of his bed room, his left arm carried in
a black silk handkerchief, gazing down at the long, low roof of Myrtle
Forge, built by his great, great grandfather Gilbert over a hundred and
ten years before. It was February, and he could hear the ringing blows
of axes, cutting the ice out of the forebay to liberate the water power
for the completion of a forging of iron destined to be rolled into
tracks for the slowly lengthening Columbia Steam Railway System. It was
midday, a grey sky held a brighter, diffused radiance where the veiled
sun hung without warmth, and the earth was everywhere frozen
granite-like. He could see beyond the Forge shed heaped charcoal, and
the black mass seemed no more dead than the ground or bare, brittle
trees sweeping down and up to where, on encircling hills, they were
lifted sharply against the cloudy monotony.