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Gilbert Penny abruptly left the room. It transpired that the Italian servant was to be left at Myrtle Forge; he was now assisting the servants in strapping a box behind the chaise that was to carry Mr. Winscombe and David to the city. Howat pictured the long, supple hands of the Italian hooking Mrs. Winscombe into her clothes, and a sudden, hot revulsion clouded his brain.
A girl absolutely different from all his cherished mental images; but, for Howat Penny, always potent, always arousing a response from his supercritical being, stirring his aesthetic heart. Everything he possessed his pictures, the albums, the moderate income, although she had little need of that had been willed to her. It would be hers then just as it was, practically, now.
"You must come away, Mariana," he continued more faintly; "fair trial, failure something to yourself, our family." "Leave Jimmy because he wasn't made superintendent!" she replied in an abstracted impatience. Then, "I wonder about a smaller plant? Won't you understand, Howat," she leaned softly over him; "I need Jim as badly as he needs me; perhaps more.
"Mariana," he demanded, "didn't the reorganization come about; isn't James Polder superintendent?" She hesitated, then replied in a low, steady voice. "Yes, Howat, it did; but they didn't move Jim up. An older, they said steadier, man was chosen." It was the oranges, he told himself, the oranges and brandy; the cursed young fool.
His head drew back on a thin, corded neck, and a faint gasping for air stirred in the shadows. Even Howat felt the pain to be unendurable, and Ludowika, white as milk, had risen to her feet. She stood with a hand half raised beneath a fringed corner of the India shawl. It was incredible that the sufferer's agony should increase, but it was apparent that it did remorselessly.
Occasionally he would glance at her, surreptitiously; his wrists would pound with an irregular, sultry circulation; longing would harass him like the beating of a club. She, it seemed to him, grew gayer, younger, more simple, every hour. Happiness, peace, radiated in her gaze, the gestures of her hands. Howat wondered at what moment he would destroy it. Reprehensible.
"We must get back of the furnace," Polder continued, indicating a narrow opening between brick walls through the unstopped chinks of which seethed the scorifying blaze. Howat Penny stood at a railing, looking down into an apparent confusion of slag and cars, pits and gigantic ladles and upright moulds set upon circular bases.
Howat himself responded thoroughly to such an expedition; to the mystery of the primitive woods, doubly withdrawn in the dark; the calls of the others, near or far, or completely lost in a silence of stars; the still immensity of a land unguessed, mythical endless trees, endless mountains, endless rivers with their headwaters buried in arctic countries beyond human experience, and emptying into the miraculous blue and gilded seas of the tropics.
I have to be at the mills for the day shift to-morrow. I came out because I had to talk a little about Mariana." He had deserted the more formal address. "And I wanted to tell some one connected with her that I have gimp of my own. I know why she won't marry me, and it's a small reason; it would be small in " "Hold up," Howat Penny interrupted, incensed.
The man's satirical virility had forbidden any of the patronage unconsciously extended to the aged. A trace of his familiar, mocking smile remained, but it was tremulous; it required, Howat saw, great effort. An involuntary admiration possessed him for the other's unquenchable courage.
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