ilosophy, his accumulated convictions, were involved; and, tie in
hand, he sat endeavouring to pierce the confusion of his ideas.

He was conscious of a slow change gathering within him; and, in itself,
that consciousness was disturbing. It had a vaguely dark, chill aspect.
He shivered, in the room super-heated by summer; his blood ran thinner
and cold. Howat Penny had a sudden, startling sense of his utter
loneliness; there was absolutely no one, now, to whom he could turn for
the understanding born of long and intimately affectionate association.
Mariana was lost to him in her own poignant affair ... No children. So
many, so much, dead. His countenance, however, grew firm with the
determination that age should not find him a coward. He had always been
bitterly contemptuous of the men that, surfeiting their appetites,
showed at the impotent last a cheap repentance. But he had done nothing
pointedly wrong; he had--the inversion repeated itself--done nothing.

XXVII

At Shadrach his customary decision returned; he went about, or sat
reading, well-ordered, cool-appearing, dogmatic. He learned from the
_Evening Post_ that Mariana was at Warrenton. She had carefully
described to him the Virginia country life, the gaiety and hard riding
of the transplanted English colonies; and he pictured her at the
successive horse shows, in the brilliant groups under the Doric columns
of the porticoes. Then, he saw, she had gone north; he found her picture
in a realistic Egyptian costume with bare, painted legs at an
extravagant ball. He studied her countenance, magnifying it with a
reading glass; but he saw nothing beyond a surface enjoyment of the
moment.

Then, to his utter surprise, on an evening after dinner, when he was
seated in the settling dusk of the porch, intent on the grey movements
of his familiar owls, a quick step mounted the path, and James Polder
appeared.

"I wanted to ask about Miss Jannan," the latter stated frankly and at
once. Howat Penny cleared his throat sharply. "I believe she is well,"
he stated formally. "You will find it cooler here." It struck him that
the young man was not deficient in that particular. More, of still
greater directness, followed. "I suppose you know," Polder stated, "that
I want to marry her ... and she won't."

"I had gathered something of the sort," the other admitted. "It's
natural, in a way." Polder proceeded gloomily: "I'd take her away from
so much. And, yet, look here-