gold to the charcoal burner he had attempted to shoot. Mrs.
Winscombe annoyed him by her attitude toward Myrtle Forge, her
unvarnished air of condescension. How old was she? A few years more than
himself, he decided. The Italian hooked her into her stays. A picture of
this formed in his thoughts and dissolved, leaving behind a faint
stinging of his nerves. He recalled her bare--naked--arms ... the old
man, her husband.

She had spoken of Italian parties; he had seen a picture on a fan
labelled Villeggiatura--a simpering exquisite in a lascivious embrace
with a frail beauty on the bank of a stream, and a garland of stripped
loves reeling about a slim, diapered Harlequin. It was a different
scene, a different world, from the Province; and its intrusion in the
person of Mrs. Winscombe was like an orris-scented air moving across the
face of great trees sweeping their virginal foliage into the region of
strong and pure winds.

He was dimly conscious of the awakening in him of undivined pressures,
the stirring of attenuated yet persisting influences. He was saturated
in the space, the sheer, immense simplicity of the wild, hardly touched
by the narrow strip of inhabited coast. He had given his existence to
the woods, to hunting cunning beasts, the stoical endurance of blinding
fatigue; he had scorned the, to him, sophistications of bricks and
civilization. But now, in the length of an evening, something invidious
and far different had become sentient in his being. Italian parties, and
Covent Garden with lanterns among the trees ... Trees clipped and
pruned, and gravel walks; seductions.

A falling meteor flashed a brilliant arc across the black horizon,
dropping into what illimitable wilderness? Fireworks set to the shrill
scraping of violins. One mingled with the other in his blood, fretting
him, spoiling the serene and sure vigour of youth, binding his feet to
the obscure past. Yet colouring all was the other, the black Welsh blood
of the Pennys. Ever since his boyhood he had heard the fact of his
peculiar inheritance explained, accepted. In the past he had been what
he was without thought, self-appraisal. But now he recognized an
essential difference from his family; it came over him in a feeling of
loneliness, of removal from the facile business of living in general.

For the first time he wondered about his future. It was unguarded by the
placid and safe engagements of the majority of lives. He would, he knew,
ultima