other would discover that he
was no longer a boy. Besides, such insinuations were a breach of
hospitality. How Mrs. Winscombe would laugh at them if she suspected
Myrtle's cheap folly.

She had asked him to call her Ludowika. He decided that he would; really
he couldn't get out of it now. It would do no harm. Ludowika! It was a
nice name; undoubtedly Polish. He thought again about what she had said
of Polish forests, the dissatisfaction that had followed her for so many
years. A lover at fourteen. A surprising sentence formed of itself in
his brain.--She had never had a chance. That pasty court life had
spoiled her. It had no significance for himself; he was simply revolving
a slightly melancholy fact.

Felix Winscombe was a sere figure, yet he was extraordinarily full of a
polished virility, rapier-like. Howat could see the dark, satirical face
shadowed by the elaborate wig, the rigid figure in precise, foppish
dress. He heard Winscombe's slightly harsh, dominant voice. His position
in England was, he knew, secure, high. Ludowika had been very sensible
in marrying him. That was the way, Howat Penny told himself, that
marriage should be consummated. He would never marry. David Schwar
appeared with a sheaf of papers, which he himself proceeded to docket,
and Howat left the counting room.

He met Ludowika almost immediately; she advanced more simply dressed
than he had ever seen her before. She pointed downward to the water
flashing over the great, turning wheel. "Couldn't we walk along the
rill? There's a path, and it's beautiful in the shadow." The stream
poured solid and green through the narrow, masoned course of the
forebay, sweeping in a lucent arc over the lip of the fall. An earthen
path followed the artificial channel through a dense grove of young
maples, seeming to hold the sun in their flame-coloured foliage. Myrtle
Forge was lost, the leaves shut out the sky; underfoot some were already
dead. The wilderness marched up to the edges of the meagre clearings.

Ludowika walked ahead, without speech; irregular patches of ruddy light
slid over her flared skirt. Suddenly she stopped with an exclamation;
the trees opened before them on the broad Canary sweeping between flat
rocks, banks bluely green. Above, the course was broken, swift; but
where they stood it was tranquil again, and crystal clear. Yellow rays
plunging through the unwrinkled surface gilded the pebbles on the
shallower bottom. A rock, broad and fla