lifted, born, rayed in an
intolerable white heat, into the air. A hammer was swung upon it; and,
as if the metal were sentient, a violet radiance scintillated where the
blow had fallen. The pasty iron was carried to the anvil, the hooks
dropped for wide-jawed tongs; the trip hammer moved up and fell. The
hardening metal darkened to a carnation from which chips scattered like
gorgeous petals. The carnation faded under ringing blows; the petals,
heaping in the penumbra under foot, were as vividly blue as gentians.
The colour vanished from the solidifying bloom ... It was ashen, black.
The hammering continued.

A sense of the vast and antique simplicity of the forging, a feeling of
hammering the earth itself into the superior purposes of man, enveloped
Howat. He forgot for the moment his companion, lost in a swelling pride
of Myrtle Forge, of his father's fibre--the iron of his character like
the iron he successfully wrought. He could grasp Gilbert Penny's
accomplishment here, take fire at its heroic quality; a thing he found
impossible in the counting room above, recording such trivial details as
wool stockings for Jonas Rupp. He could be a forgeman, he thought, but
never a clerk; and in that limitation he realized that he was inferior
to his father. There were aspects of himself beyond such discipline and
control.

Ludowika Winscombe grasped his arm. "Come away," she begged; "it's--it's
savage, like Vulcan and dreadful, early legends." She hurried him,
clinging to his arm, over the ascent to the orderly lawn, the tranquil
shine of candle-lit windows. There, with her hood fallen from her head,
she sat on a stone step.

"You frighten me, a little," she confessed. "Are you at all like--like
that below inside of you? I have a feeling that you might be. If you
were one of the men about Vauxhall you'd be kissing me now ... if I
liked you. But, although I do like you, I wouldn't kiss you for an
emerald buckle." He recognized that she spoke seriously; her voice bore
no connective suggestion. Kisses, it appeared, were no more to her than
little flowers which she dealt out casually where she pleased. Yet the
idea, with its intimate sensual implications, stayed in his thoughts. He
considered kissing her, holding her mouth against his; and he was
conscious of a sharp return of his stinging sense of her bodily
seductiveness.

At the same time an obscure uneasiness, rebellion, possessed him; it was
the old, familiar feeling of r