He recalled the fan with its painted
Villeggiatura, the naked, wanton loves. "Something different," she half
repeated, with a sigh, an accent, of longing. Howat heard her with
impatience; it was absurd to try to picture her tramping in the
wilderness, breaking her way hour after hour through thorned underbrush,
like Fanny Gilkan. She wouldn't progress a hundred yards in her unsteady
pattens and fragile clothes.

Suddenly the Italian servant appeared absolutely noiselessly at her
side, speaking a ridiculous, oily gibberish. "At once," she replied. She
turned to Howat. "My bed has been prepared. Are you going to-morrow?"

"No," he answered awkwardly. She turned and left without further words.
The servant walked behind her, resembling an unnatural shadow.

The metallic clamour at the anvil rose and fell, diminished by the
interposed bulk of the dwellings, ceaselessly forging the Penny iron,
the Penny gold. He thought of himself as metal under the hammer; or
rather ore at the furnace: he hadn't run clear in the casting; there
were bubbles, bubbles and slag. Endless refinements--first the furnace
and then the forge and then the metal. A contempt for the lesser degrees
possessed him, for a flawed or clumsy forging, for weakness of the
flesh, the fatality of easy surrender. An overwhelming, passionate
emotion swept him to his feet, clenched his hands, filled him with a
numbing desire to reach the last purification.

The mood sank into an inexplicable nostalgia; he dragged the back of a
hand impatiently across his vision. His persistent indifference, the
inhibition that held him in a contemptuous isolation, again possessed
him, Howat, a black Penny. A last trace of his emotion, caught in the
flood of his paramount disdain, vanished like a breath of warm mist. He
entered the house and mounted to his room; the stairs creaked but that
was the only sound audible within. His candles burned without their
protecting glasses in smooth, unwavering flames. When they were
extinguished the darkness flowed in and blotted out familiar objects,
folded him in a cloak of invisibility, obliterated him in sleep. As he
lost consciousness he heard the trip hammer dully beating out Penny
iron, Penny gold; beating out, too, the Penny men ... Slag and metal and
ruffled muslin, roman candles and stars.

V

There came to him in the counting house, the following afternoon,
rumours and echoes of the day's happenings. David Forsythe had arriv