lled
with soft lace and pinned with a garnet brooch, and a deep-fringed,
white silk shawl. The conversation was ambling, but, to Jasper Penny,
pitched in a key of utter delight. He said little through supper; and,
at its end, with Graham Jannan, immediately followed the others into the
parlour.

There Mary Jannan repeated her songs, French, English and Italian; and
Jasper Penny listened with a poignant, emotional response. Graham and
his wife had arranged to sleigh back to Shadrach Furnace that evening;
but Susan Brundon was to stay at Myrtle Forge, and take the train from
Jaffa to-morrow. The Jannans, finally, departed; and Jasper Penny,
showing Susan through the chambers of the lower floor, succeeded in
delaying her, seated, in the smoking room.

XVII

Now that the moment which he had so carefully planned had arrived he was
curiously reluctant to precipitate Susan and himself into the future.
The lamps on a mantel, hooded in alabaster, cast a diffused radiance
over Susan's silvery dress, on her countenance faintly flushed above the
white folds of the shawl. "What is that sound?" she suddenly queried. "I
heard it all through supper and before. It seems to live in the walls,
the very air, here."

"The trip hammer of Myrtle Forge," he replied gravely. "I suppose it
might, fancifully, be called the beating of the Penny heart; it does
pound through every associated stone; and I have a notion that when it
stops we shall stop too. The Penny men have all been faithful to it, and
it has been faithful to us, given us a hold in a new country, a hold of
wrought iron."

"How beautiful," she murmured; "how strong and safe!"

"It pleases me that you feel that," he plunged directly into his
purpose; "for I intend to offer you all the strength and safety it
contains." Her hands fluttered to her cheeks; a sudden fear touched
her, yet her eyes found his unwaveringly. "If that were all," he
continued, standing above her, "if I had only to tell you of the iron,
if the metal were flawless, I'd be overwhelmed with gladness. But almost
no iron is perfect, the longest refining leaves bubbles, faults. Men are
like that, too ... Susan." She grew troubled, sensitively following his
mood; her hands were now pressed to her breast, her lips parted. She was
so bewilderingly pure, in her dim-lit, pearly haze of silk, that he
paused with an involuntary contraction of pain at what must follow.

"The child, Eunice," he struggled on; "I