, the heart, of his
life. No material catastrophe could shape, deplete, her richness of
spirit. Fragile as she was, with her need of rest, her diffidence and
pallor, she yet seemed to Jasper Penny the most--the only--secure thing
in the world. She defied, he murmured, death itself. Wonderful.

He moved slowly to his sombre bed room, with its dark velour hangings
and ponderous black walnut furniture, precisely scrolled with gilt. The
interior absorbed the light of a single lamp, robbing it of radiance. A
clock deliberately struck the hour with an audible whirring of the
spring. Jasper Penny took out from a drawer a tall, narrow ledger, its
calf binding powdering in a yellow dust, with a blurring label,
"Forgebook. Myrtle Forge, 1750." He sat, opening it on the arm of an old
Windsor reading chair he had insisted on retaining among the recent
upholstery, and studied the entries, some written in a small script with
ornamental capitals and red lined day headings, others in an abrupt
manner with heavy down strokes. The latter, he knew, had been made by
his great grandfather, Howat.

"Jonas Rupp charged with three pair of woollen stockings ... shoes for
Minnie." Howat had been young when Minnie's shoes were new; twenty
something--five or six. He must have married not long after.
Howat--like himself--a black Penny. The special interest Jasper Penny
felt for this particular ancestor grew so vivid that he almost felt the
other's presence in the room at his shoulder. He consciously repressed
the desire to turn suddenly and surprise the shadowy and yet clear
figure in the gloom. The features of the youth so long gone, and yet,
too, he felt, the replica of his own young years, were plain; the dark
eyes, slanted brows, the impatient mouth.

His community of sympathy with the other, who was still, in a measure,
himself, was inexplicable; for obviously Howat had escaped Jasper's
blundering--an early marriage, a son, the son whose name, like his
mother's, made such an exotic note in a long, sound succession of
Isabels and Carolines and Gilberts, was a far different tale from his
own. Yet it persisted. It seemed to him that the silence of the room
grew strained, there was the peculiar tension of a muteness desperately
striving for utterance. He waited, listened, in a rigidity of which he
was suddenly ashamed; ridiculous. He relaxed; the memory of his own
youth flooded back, rapt him in visions, scents, sounds. The premonitory
whirring