“That’s little to me,” she replied flippantly, rising.  “I think I’ll go up; and I almost think I will kiss you again.”  He grumbled a protest, and watched her trail from the room, the silver girdle and chiffon emphasizing her thin, vigorous body, the lamplight falling on her bare, sharp shoulders.  Howat Penny had early acquired a habit of long hours, and it was past one when he put aside his papers, stood for a moment on the porch.  The fireflies were gone, the locusts seemed farther away, and the soft, heavy flight of an owl rose from the warm grass.

Below, on the right, he could vaguely see the broken bulk of what had been Shadrach Furnace, the ruined shape of the past.  The Pennys no longer made iron.  His father had marked the last casting.  They no longer listened to the beat of the trip hammer, but to the light rhythm of a conductor’s baton; they heard, in place of ringing metal, a tenor’s grace notes.  Soon they would hear nothing.  They went out, for all time, with himself.  It was fitting that the last, true to their peculiar inheritance, should be a black Penny.  He, Howat, was that—­the ancient Welsh blood finally gathered in a cup of life before it was spilled.

Old influences quickened within him; but, attenuated, they were no more than regrets.  They came late to trouble his remnant of living.  He was like the Furnace, a sign of what had been; yet, he thought in self-extenuation, he had brought no dishonour, no dragging of the tradition through the muck of a public scandal.  Not that ... nor anything else.  Now, when it was absurd, he was resentful of the part he had played in life; like a minor, cracked voice, he extended a former figure with a saving touch of humour, importuning the director because he had not been cast in the great roles.  The night mist came up and brushed him; he was conscious of a sudden chill, an aching of the wrists.  “Cracked,” he repeated, aloud, and retreated into the house; where, Rudolph gone up, he put out the lights and stiffly retired.

XXV

They accomplished little the following morning.  Mariana, in a scant brown linen skirt, a sheer waist through which were visible precarious incidentals and narrow black ribbon, and the confoundedest green stockings he had ever seen, lounged indolently in a canvas swing.  The heat increased in a reddish haze through which the sun poured like molten copper.  “You’d better come inside,” he said from the doorway; “the house, shut up, is quite comfortable.”  Within the damp of the old, stone walls made a comparative coolness.  The shades were drawn down, and they sat in an untimely twilight.

“When I think of how energetic Eliza will be,” Mariana asserted, “I am already overwhelmed.  But you never look hot, Howat; you are always beautiful.”  His flannels and straw-coloured silk coat were crisply ironed; his hair, his scarf and lustrous yellow shoes, precise.  “Howat,” she continued almost anxiously, “you put a lot on, well—­good form.  You think that the way a man knots his tie is tremendously significant—­”