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He might even have become reconciled to James Polder. His first, unfavourable opinion of the latter, he realized, had been modified by by time. He had judged Polder solely in the light of an old standard. The fellow was painfully honest; good stuff there, iron ... the iron of the Pennys. But the other strain had betrayed him. A cursed shame.
Then Mariana appeared, walked swiftly, without a word, through the room, and vanished upstairs. Not even a civil period at the end of the evening. After another, long wait James Polder entered. The latter stood uneasily by the table, with a furrowed brow, a ridiculous, twitching mouth.
The governor sent Fleming to see if all was right in the Porcupine, while he himself went to see if a new battery, which he had just established to check the approaches of the enemy towards the Polder Half-moon and Ravelin in a point very near the counterscarp, was doing its duty. Being, as usual, anxious to reconnoitre with his own eyes, he jumped upon the rampart.
Meantime those who had effected a lodgment in the Polder, the Square, and the other southern forts, found, after the chief assault had failed, that they had gained nothing by their temporary triumph but the certainty of being butchered. Retreat was impossible, and no quarter was given.
All was quiet again, and the garrison in the Porcupine were congratulating themselves on their victory when suddenly the ubiquitous Philip Fleeting plunged, with a face of horror, into the governor's quarters, informing him that the attack on the redoubt had been a feint, and that the Spaniards were at that very moment swarming all over the three external forts, called the South Square, the West Square, and the Polder.
A porch, added, the former said, in Jasper Penny's time, extended at the left; and they stood on the broken flooring and gazed down at a featureless tangle once a garden and the gnarled remainder of a small apple orchard beyond. Polder soon returned, and they proceeded to a door on the further side, where the kitchen angle partly enclosed a flagging of broad stones.
A futile effort, he added, with his vague consciousness of implacable destiny, his dim sense of man moved from without, in locked progression. Polder was young, rebellious; but he could grow older; he would grow older and comprehend; or else beat himself to death on obdurate circumstance. What concerned Howat was the hope that Mariana would be no further involved in either process.
The latter was plainly chagrined at this light thrown on his petty appetites. He assumed an air of complete detachment in the portioning of the dish; but, at the same time, managed to supply himself liberally. The conversation was sporadic. Howat Penny found the dinner lavish, and divided his attention between it and Kate Polder.
A very few of them will suffice to indicate the general aspect of the operations. On the extreme southwest of Ostend had been in peaceful times a polder the general term to designate a pasture out of which the sea-water had been pumped and the forts in that quarter were accordingly called by that name, as Polder Half-moon, Polder Ravelin, or great and little Polder Bulwark, as the case might be.
President Polder," she smiled brilliantly at him. "Why not?" queried James, the sanguine, at once defiant, haggard and intense. The following day Howat Penny was both weary and irritable. Mariana declared, remorsefully, that she had selfishly dragged him away from Shadrach; and proposed countless trivial amends, which he fretfully blocked.
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