been upset
since his day, when the boxes and pit had been so conveniently
separated; old boundaries no longer defined, limited, their content;
social demarcations were being obliterated by a growing disaffection. It
was very unfortunate, for, as he was seeing, unhappiness ensued. It was
bound to. An irritability seized him at being dragged into such useless
conjecturing; into, at his age, confusing complications; and he greeted
with relief the long, low front of his dwelling at Shadrach, its old
grey stone a seeming outcropping of the old green turf, the aged,
surrounding trees.

XXIX

Mariana, however, followed him almost immediately. She stood before him
in an informal, belted black wool sweater, a ridiculously inadequate
skirt, and the solid shoes he detested on women. But he soon forgot her
garb.

"Howat," she told him, "I have made a cowardly and terrible mistake. I
was meant to marry Jimmy, and I didn't. Perhaps I have ruined his life.
Mine will be nothing without him." They were in the middle room, and a
fire of hickory was burning in the panelled hearth. She dropped on a
chair, and sat gazing into the singing flames. Here it's all to do over,
he thought, with a feeling of weariness. "He may get along very well
with his Harriet," he remarked, resentful of his dissipated contentment.

"You know he won't," she replied sharply. "He loves me; and I love him,
Howat. I never knew how much, or how little anything else mattered,
until I was in my room, after his wedding. It wasn't a wedding, really,"
she declared. "All that doesn't make one. He'll find it out, too. Jimmy
will be desperate, and I'm afraid he will drink harder. He told me they
were getting frightfully strict about that at the Works. And there's
that reorganization; it will embitter him if he isn't made
superintendent. He has worked splendidly for it. That woman he--he went
off with is a squash," she said vindictively. "She will be in bed when
he goes away in the morning, and in crepe de Chine negligee when he gets
back. Perhaps it won't last," she added thoughtfully.

The sense of future security generated in Howat Penny by the marriage
abruptly departed. He fumbled with his glass, directed it at Mariana.
"What do you mean by that?" he demanded. "I would go to him like a shot,
if he needed me," she coolly returned. The dreadful part of it was that
he was sure she would. "Nonsense," he asserted, hiding his concern;
"there will be no fence clim