ous, Jim," she replied; "the only stirring thing I have ever
known in a particularly silly world. But you mustn't let it run you,
too, into steel rails. President Polder," she smiled brilliantly at him.
"Why not?" queried James, the sanguine, at once defiant, haggard and
intense.

XXXII

The following day Howat Penny was both weary and irritable. Mariana
declared, remorsefully, that she had selfishly dragged him away from
Shadrach; and proposed countless trivial amends, which he fretfully
blocked. He had no intention of affording her such a ready escape from a
sense, he hoped, of error and responsibility. Before dinner, however, he
found himself walking with her over the deep green sod that reached to
the public road below. A mock orange hedge enclosed his lawn, bounding
the cross roads, the upper course leading to Myrtle Forge; and beyond
they passed, on the left, the collapsed stone walls and fallen shingles
of what, evidently, had been a small blacksmith's shed. Farther along
they came to the sturdy shell of an old, single-room building, erected,
perhaps, when Shadrach Furnace was new, with weeds climbing through the
rotten floor, and a fragment of steps, rising to the mouldering peak of
a loft, still clinging to a wall.

Without definite purpose they turned from the public way into an
overgrown path, banked with matted blackberry bushes, and were soon
facing the remains of the Furnace. It had been solidly constructed of
unmasoned stone, bound by iron rods, and its bulk was largely unaffected
by time. The hearth had fallen in, choked by luxuriant greenery; but the
blank sides mounted to meet the walled path reaching out to its top from
the abrupt hill against which it had been placed. Before it foundations
could still be traced; and above, a rectangle of windowless stone walls
survived, roofless and desolate. An abandoned road turned up the hill,
and they followed it to where they could gaze into the upper ruin and
the Furnace top below. Everywhere nature had marked or twisted aside cut
stone and wood with its living greenery. Farther down a pathlike level
followed the side of the hill, ending abruptly in a walled fall, and a
confusion of broken beams, iron braces, and section of a large,
wheel-like circumference. Out beyond were other crumbling remains of old
activity--a stone span across the dried course of a water way, and a
wide bank, showing through a hardy vegetation the grey-brown
inequalities of sl