winter. He walked about the house. The counting room of the forge was a
separate stone structure back of the kitchen; and to the right, and
farther away, was a second small building. The ground fell rapidly down
to the Forge on the water power below. He could barely discern the
towering bulk of the water wheel and roofs of the sheds.

He felt uneasy, obscurely and emotionally disturbed. Already Fanny
Gilkan seemed far away, to have dropped out of his life. He would give
some gold to the charcoal burner he had attempted to shoot. Mrs.
Winscombe annoyed him by her attitude toward Myrtle Forge, her
unvarnished air of condescension. How old was she? A few years more than
himself, he decided. The Italian hooked her into her stays. A picture of
this formed in his thoughts and dissolved, leaving behind a faint
stinging of his nerves. He recalled her bare--naked--arms ... the old
man, her husband.

She had spoken of Italian parties; he had seen a picture on a fan
labelled Villeggiatura--a simpering exquisite in a lascivious embrace
with a frail beauty on the bank of a stream, and a garland of stripped
loves reeling about a slim, diapered Harlequin. It was a different
scene, a different world, from the Province; and its intrusion in the
person of Mrs. Winscombe was like an orris-scented air moving across the
face of great trees sweeping their virginal foliage into the region of
strong and pure winds.

He was dimly conscious of the awakening in him of undivined pressures,
the stirring of attenuated yet persisting influences. He was saturated
in the space, the sheer, immense simplicity of the wild, hardly touched
by the narrow strip of inhabited coast. He had given his existence to
the woods, to hunting cunning beasts, the stoical endurance of blinding