y. "You don't suppose a joke that size was the great Gilbert's
plant. Here's the drop for the water power; yes, and the iron pinions of
the overshot wheel." He climbed down a precarious wall, and stood
perhaps twelve feet below them. Securing a rough bolt, he brought it up
for their inspection. "Look at that forging," he cried; "after it has
lain around for a century and a half. Like silk. Charcoal iron, and it
was hammered, too. Metal isn't half worked any more. We could turn that
into steel at almost nothing a ton." He showed them in the mouldering
shed the foundation of the anvil, traced the probable shafting of the
trip hammer, marked the location of the hearths. "Three," he decided;
"and a cold trickle of air. A nigger pumping a bellows, probably. No,
they could get that from the wheel," he drew an explanatory diagram in
the blackened dust.

With the lunch basket on the running board of the motor they ate sitting
on the low boundary wall of the lawn. The heat increased through the
late May noon, and Howat remained while Mariana and James Polder
wandered in the direction of the orchard. Finally the sun forced the
former to move; and he, too, proceeded in a desultory manner, entering
the shade of a grove of old maples. The trees, their earliest red
leafage already emerald, followed the dry channel cut back from Canary
Creek to the Forge, and he soon emerged at the broad, flashing course of
the stream. A flat rock jutted into the hurrying water by an overthrown
dam, its sun-heated expanse now in shadow; and he stayed, listening to
the gurgling flow. Far above him a hawk wheeled in ambient space; a mill
whistle sounded remotely from Jaffa.

The thought of Mariana hovered at the back of his lulled being; all he
desired, he told himself, was her complete happiness. 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. The material of the present,
moulded, perhaps, into seemingly new forms, was always that of the
past. This Polder was Essie Scofield and Jasper ... Byron. He, Howat
Penny, was Penny and Jannan and Penny--Daniel, James, Casimir, and Howat
once more, the older Howat who had married the widow of Felix Winscombe.
Black again