are unwilling to conserve, make safe, her future, in case I die?" All
that his father said was logical, just; but it only brought him a
renewed sense of his impotence before very old and implacable inner
forces.

"I'll try again," he briefly agreed. "But I warn you, it will do little
good. There is no pretence in the affection you spoke of, but--but
something stronger--" he gave up as hopeless the effort to explain all
that had swept through his mind.

Gilbert Penny abruptly left the room.

It transpired that the Italian servant was to be left at Myrtle Forge;
he was now assisting the servants in strapping a box behind the chaise
that was to carry Mr. Winscombe and David to the city. Howat pictured
the long, supple hands of the Italian hooking Mrs. Winscombe into her
clothes, and a sudden, hot revulsion clouded his brain. When the
carriage had gone, and he stood in the contracted space of the counting
room, before a long, narrow forge book open on a high desk, he was still
conscious of a strong repulsion. It was idiotic to let such an
insignificant fact as the Winscombes' man persistently annoy him. But,
in a manner entirely unaccountable, this Cecco had become a symbol of
much that was dark, potentially threatening, in his conjectures.

The hammer fell with a full reiteration through the afternoon; the sun,
at a small window, shifted a dusty bar across inkpots and quills and
desk to a higher corner. He could hear the dull turning of the wheel and
the thin, irregular splash of falling water. Other sounds rose at
intervals--the tramping of mules dragging pig iron from Shadrach, the
rumble of its deposit by the Forge. Emanuel Schwar entered with a piece