hen the
carriage had gone, and he stood in the contracted space of the counting
room, before a long, narrow forge book open on a high desk, he was still
conscious of a strong repulsion. It was idiotic to let such an
insignificant fact as the Winscombes' man persistently annoy him. But,
in a manner entirely unaccountable, this Cecco had become a symbol of
much that was dark, potentially threatening, in his conjectures.

The hammer fell with a full reiteration through the afternoon; the sun,
at a small window, shifted a dusty bar across inkpots and quills and
desk to a higher corner. He could hear the dull turning of the wheel and
the thin, irregular splash of falling water. Other sounds rose at
intervals--the tramping of mules dragging pig iron from Shadrach, the
rumble of its deposit by the Forge. Emanuel Schwar entered with a piece
of paper in his hand. "Eleven hundred weight of number two," he read;
"at six pounds, and a load of charcoal. Jonas Hupp charged with three
pairs of woollen stockings, and shoes for Minnie, four shillings more."

Howat mechanically entered the enumerated items, his distaste for such a
petty occupation mounting until it resembled a concrete power forcing
him outside into the mellow end of the day. A figure darkened the
doorway; it was Caroline. "I hardly saw him," she declared hotly.
"Myrtle hung like a sickly flower in his buttonhole." Her hoops
flattened as she made her way through the narrow entrance. "There's one
thing about Myrtle," she continued, "she's frightfully proper in her
narrow little ideas. Myrtle's a prude. And I promise you I won't be if I
get a chance at David." She stood with vivid, parted lips, bright eyes;
almost, Howat thought, charming. Such a spirit in Caroline amazed him;
he hadn't conceived of its presence. He recognized a phase of his own
contempt for customary paths, accepted limitations and proprieties.
"Remember David's Quaker training," he told her in his habitual air of
jest. "David's been to London," she replied. "I saw him pinch the
Appletofft girl at the farm."

Again in his room, he changed into more formal clothes than on the
evening previous; he did this without a definite, conscious purpose; it
was as if his attitude of mind required a greater suavity of exterior.
He wore a London waistcoat, a gift from his mother, of magenta worked
with black petals and black stone buttons; his breeches were without a
wrinkle, and the tails of his coat, even if they w