gled upright.

"Good night," she said ungraciously, to them both, and flickered away
through the dark. James Polder was savagely biting his lips; his hands,
the elder saw, were clenched. "Your wife," Howat proceeded, "how is
she?" Polder gazed at him stonily, without reply. "I asked after your
wife," Howat repeated irritably. "No," the other at last said, "you
reminded me of her. I suppose you are right." He turned and walked
abruptly from the porch, into the slowly dropping rain.

XXXIII

The road to Myrtle Forge mounted between rolling cultivated fields, the
scattered, stone ruins of walls erected in the earliest iron days; and,
after a pastoral course, came to the Forge dwelling, its shuttered bulk
set in a tangle of bushes and rank grass. An ancient beech tree swept
the ground with smooth, grey limbs, surrounded by long-accumulated dead
leaves. James Polder shut off the motor by the low, stone wall that
supported the lawn from the roadway; he crossed to the farm, where the
house keys were kept, and Howat and Mariana moved slowly forward. A
porch, added, the former said, in Jasper Penny's time, extended at the
left; and they stood on the broken flooring and gazed down at a
featureless tangle once a garden and the gnarled remainder of a small
apple orchard beyond.

Polder soon returned, and they proceeded to a door on the further side,
where the kitchen angle partly enclosed a flagging of broad stones.
Inside, the house, empty of furnishing, was a place of echoes muffled in
dust; the insidious, dank odours of corrupting wood and plaster; walls
with melancholy, superimposed, stripping papers; older, sombrely
blistered paint and panelled wainscoting varnished in an imitation,
yellow graining. It was without a relic of past dignity. Mariana was
unable to discover a souvenir of the generations of Pennys that had
filled the rooms with the stir of their living. Once more outside they
sat on the stone threshold of an office-like structure back of the main
dwelling and indulged in cigarettes.

The disturbing tension of last night, Howat thought comfortably, had
vanished. Mariana was flippant, James Polder enveloped in indolent ease.
"The Forge," Howat Penny told them, "was below." A path descended across
a steep face of sparse grass; and, at the bottom, Polder's interest
revived. "It stood there," he indicated a fallen shed beyond a masoned
channel, choked with the broken stones of its walls and tangled
shrubber