fatigue; he had scorned the, to him, sophistications of bricks and
civilization. But now, in the length of an evening, something invidious
and far different had become sentient in his being. Italian parties, and
Covent Garden with lanterns among the trees ... Trees clipped and
pruned, and gravel walks; seductions.

A falling meteor flashed a brilliant arc across the black horizon,
dropping into what illimitable wilderness? Fireworks set to the shrill
scraping of violins. One mingled with the other in his blood, fretting
him, spoiling the serene and sure vigour of youth, binding his feet to
the obscure past. Yet colouring all was the other, the black Welsh blood
of the Pennys. Ever since his boyhood he had heard the fact of his
peculiar inheritance explained, accepted. In the past he had been what
he was without thought, self-appraisal. But now he recognized an
essential difference from his family; it came over him in a feeling of
loneliness, of removal from the facile business of living in general.

For the first time he wondered about his future. It was unguarded by the
placid and safe engagements of the majority of lives. He would, he knew,
ultimately possess Myrtle Forge, a part of Shadrach, and a considerable
fortune. That was his obvious inheritance. But, suddenly, the material
thing, the actual, grew immaterial, and the visionary assumed a dark and
enigmatic reality.

Howat abruptly quitted the night of the lawn, his sombre questioning,
for the house. The candles had been extinguished in the drawing room. A
square, glass lamp hung at the foot of the stairs; and there he
encountered a man in a scratch wig, with a long nose flattened at the
end. He bowed obsequiously--a posturing figure in shirtsleeves with a
green cloth waistcoat and black legs. The Italian servant, Howat