but, in
the Province, I wonder?"

He sat half comprehending her words mingling in his brain with the
pounding of the trip hammer at the Forge, one familiar and one
unfamiliar yet not strange sound. Above them, on the lawn, he could see
Myrtle--through the middle of the day the sun had increased its
warmth--with skirts like the petals of a fabulous tea rose. The sun
glinted on the living gold of her hair and bathed an arm white as snow.
David was there no doubt. His thoughts dwelt for a moment on Caroline,
then returned to Mrs. Winscombe, to himself. His entire attitude toward
her, his observations, had been upset, disarmed, by her unexpected air
of soft melancholy. In her lavender wrap she resembled a drooping branch
of flowering lilac. She seemed very young; her air of sophistication,
her sensuality of being, had vanished. Traces of her illness on
shipboard still lingered darkly under her eyes. Asleep, he suddenly
thought, her face would be very innocent, purified. This came to him
involuntarily; there was none of the stinging of the senses she had
evoked in him the night before. His instinct for preservation from any
entanglements with life lay dormant before her surrender to influences
that left her crumpled, without the slightest interest in any exterior
fact.

A sententious black servant in maroon livery and a bright worsted
waistcoat announced dinner from the foot of the terrace, and they moved
slowly toward the house. There was a concerted interest in the faces
they found already about the table. Howat took his seat at his mother's
side, Gilbert Penny assisted Mrs. Winscombe. David was placed between
Caroline and Myrtle. Mr. Winscombe, again formally wigged and coated,
was absorbed in thought. He said to his hostess, "It's the uncertainty
that puts me in doubt. Ogle thought the thing thoroughly reviewed, when
now Hamilton comes out with his damned Indians and Maryland rum.
Forsythe suggests my presence in Council to-morrow, and it's barely
possible that there will be a return to Annapolis. While Ludowika--"

"I can't travel another ell over the atrocities they call roads here,"
Mrs. Winscombe declared. "I expect to die returning to England as it is,
and I won't put up with any more preliminary torment. You'll have to
leave me."

"At Myrtle Forge," Gilbert Penny added at once; "at Myrtle Forge as long
as you like. Unless," he added with a smile, "you prefer the gaiety at
Abner Forsythe's." A hot colour suffu