miled at him, relaxed,
content. He was surprised that she could not see the tumultuous feeling
overpowering him. He had heard that women were immediately aware of
such emotion. But he realized that she had been lulled into a false
sense of security, of present immunity from "the old, old thing," by her
own placidity. He did not know when his mother left the room. He
wondered continuously when it would happen, when the bolt would fall,
what she would do. Howat was hot and cold, and possessed by a subtle
sense of improbity, a feeling resembling that of a doubtful advance
through the dark, for a questionable end. This was the least part of
him, insignificant; his passion grew constantly stronger, more brutal.
In a last, vanishing trace of his superior consciousness he recognized
that the thing must have happened to him as it did; it was the price of
his more erect pride, his greater contempt, his solitary and unspent
state.

She rose suddenly and announced that she was about to retire. It saved
them for the moment, for that day; he muttered something
incomprehensible and she was gone.

Isabel Penny returned and took Mrs. Winscombe's place before the fire.
She spoke trivially, at random intervals. A great longing swept over him
to tell his mother everything, try to find an escape in her wise
counsel; but his emotion seemed so ugly that he could not lay it before
her. Besides, he had a conviction that it would be hopeless: he was
gone. She was discussing Ludowika now. "Really," she said, "they seem
very well matched, a good arrangement." She was referring, he realized,
to the Winscombes' experience. He never thought of Felix Winscombe as
married, Ludowika's husband; he had ceased to think of him at all. The
present moment banished everything else. "She has a quality usually
destroyed by life about a Court," the leisurely voice went on; "she
seems quite happy here, for a little, in a way simple. But, curiously
enough, she disturbs your father. He can't laugh with her as he usually
does with attractive women."

It was natural, Howat thought, that Gilbert Penny should be uneasy
before such a direct reminder of the setting from which he had taken
Isabel Howat. It was a life, memories, in which the elder had no part;
that consciousness dictated a part of his father's bitterness toward St.
James, the Royal Government. But Gilbert Penny had never had serious
reason to dread it. His wife had left it all behind, permanently,
with