t
do what you ask. I have a headache now thinking about Felix and you and
myself. No one must find out." What followed was lost, then came a
signature that, with the aid of a reading glass, he barely
deciphered--"Ludowika."

That was the name of the woman, a widow, Gilbert's son had married. Her
first husband, Felix Winscombe, had died at Myrtle Forge during a
diplomatic mission from England.... An old man with a young wife! His
confusion, slowly resolving into a comprehension of what the note
implied, filled him with an increasing revolt. The earlier Howat, too,
like Jasper, in the tangle of an intrigue--not a public scandal and
shame, as had been the later, but no less offensive. In a flare of anger
Howat Penny crumpled the paper and flung it into the fire. There it
instantly blackened, burst into flame and wavered, a shuddering cinder,
up the chimney. He put the ledger, loosely wrapped in its covering, on
the table, and sat breathing rapidly, curiously disturbed. The old
fault, projected so unexpectedly out of the faithless burial of the
past, struck at him with the weight of a personal affront.

The heat subsided in the hearth, with the nightly ebbing of steam in the
radiator; the hickory, disintegrating into blocks, faded from cherry red
to pulsating, and finally dead, ash. Lost in the bitterness of his
thoughts he made no movement to replenish the fire.

He wondered if the explored histories of other families would show such
scarring records as his own. Were there everywhere, back of each heart,
puddles, sloughs, masked in the deceiving probity maintained for public
view? And now--Mariana! Yet, somehow, her affair did not appear as ugly
as these others. Stated coldly, in conventional terms, it was little
different. Why, in plain words she had ... but Mariana evaded plain
words, her challenging courage forbade them. Here was more than could be
arraigned, convicted, by a stereotyped judgment. Or perhaps this was
only his affection for her, blinding him to the truth.

The first Howat and Jasper, striking contemptuously across the barriers
of social morals, lived in Mariana, alone with James Polder in
illegitimate circumstance, and in himself--an old man without family,
without the supporting memory of actual achievement; the negative decay
of a negative existence. His mind, confronted by a painful complexity of
unanswerable problems, failed utterly. He was conscious of his impotence
chilling his blood, deadening