lmost think I will kiss you again." He grumbled a protest,
and watched her trail from the room, the silver girdle and chiffon
emphasizing her thin, vigorous body, the lamplight falling on her bare,
sharp shoulders. Howat Penny had early acquired a habit of long hours,
and it was past one when he put aside his papers, stood for a moment on
the porch. The fireflies were gone, the locusts seemed farther away, and
the soft, heavy flight of an owl rose from the warm grass.

Below, on the right, he could vaguely see the broken bulk of what had
been Shadrach Furnace, the ruined shape of the past. The Pennys no
longer made iron. His father had marked the last casting. They no longer
listened to the beat of the trip hammer, but to the light rhythm of a
conductor's baton; they heard, in place of ringing metal, a tenor's
grace notes. Soon they would hear nothing. They went out, for all time,
with himself. It was fitting that the last, true to their peculiar
inheritance, should be a black Penny. He, Howat, was that--the ancient
Welsh blood finally gathered in a cup of life before it was spilled.

Old influences quickened within him; but, attenuated, they were no more
than regrets. They came late to trouble his remnant of living. He was
like the Furnace, a sign of what had been; yet, he thought in
self-extenuation, he had brought no dishonour, no dragging of the
tradition through the muck of a public scandal. Not that ... nor
anything else. Now, when it was absurd, he was resentful of the part he
had played in life; like a minor, cracked voice, he extended a former
figure with a saving touch of humour, importuning the director because
he had not been cast in the great roles. The night mist came up and
brushed him; he was conscious of a sudden chill, an aching of the
wrists. "Cracked," he repeated, aloud, and retreated into the house;
where, Rudolph gone up, he put out the lights and stiffly retired.

XXV

They accomplished little the following morning. Mariana, in a scant
brown linen skirt, a sheer waist through which were visible precarious
incidentals and narrow black ribbon, and the confoundedest green
stockings he had ever seen, lounged indolently in a canvas swing. The
heat increased in a reddish haze through which the sun poured like
molten copper. "You'd better come inside," he said from the doorway;
"the house, shut up, is quite comfortable." Within the damp of the old,
stone walls made a comparative coolness. The