al instinct, humiliating to the human
individual, to breed. It was the mere repetition of nature through the
working of an automatic law. No such obscure fate, he determined, should
overtake, obliterate, him. Yet it had involved his mother, a person of
the first superiority. A slight chill, as if a breath of imminent winter
had touched him, communicated itself to his heart.

A trivial conversation was in progress across the table between Mrs.
Winscombe and Myrtle. The latter was an embodiment of the familiar Saxon
type of beauty; her hair was fair, infinitely pale gold, her complexion
a delicately mingled crimson and white, her eyes as candidly blue as
flowers. Her features were finely moulded, and her shoulders, slipping
out from azure lutestring, were like smooth handfuls of meringue. Her
voice was always formal, and it sounded stilted, forced, in comparison
with Mrs. Winscombe's easy periods.

The supper ended, and the company trailed into a drawing room at the
opposite end of the house from the kitchen wing. Howat delayed, and
Caroline, urged forward by Mr. Winscombe's sardonically ubiquitous bow,
half lingered to cast back a glance of private understanding at her
brother. When he decided reluctantly to follow he was kept back by the
sound of a familiar explanation in his father's decisive, full tones.

"Howat," he pronounced, obviously addressing the elder Winscombe, "is a
black Penny. That is what we call them in our family. You see, the
Pennys, some hundreds of years back, acquired a strong Welsh strain. I
take it you are familiar with the Welsh--a solitary-living, dark lot.
Unamenable to influence, reflect their country, I suppose; but lovers
of music. I have a touch of that. Now any one would think that such a
blood, so long ago, would have spread out, been diluted, in a thick
English stock like the Pennys; or at least that we would all have had a
little, here and there. But nothing of the sort; it sinks entirely out
of sight for two or three and sometimes four generations; and then
appears solid, in one individual, as unslacked as the pure, original
thing. The last one was burned as a heretic in Mary's day; although I
believe he would have equally stayed Catholic if the affair had been the
other way around. Opposition's their breath. This boy--"

"You must not figure to yourself, Mr. Winscombe," Mrs. Penny's even
voice admirably cut in, "that the black is a word of reproach. I think
we are both at times at