baby. Well, God knows where they have been, how many days they have
walked; their shoes were in shreds. And their faces, thin and serious,
have looked steadily over rifles at death. The women, too. You'll only
get them here, in a big country, a new--"

"They were terrible," Ludowika declared; "savage. I was glad when they
were by. The baby at the woman's great breast!" she shuddered at the
memory. "Like animals."

He gazed at her with a slight surprise; he had never heard her speak so
bitterly. He saw her more clearly than ever before; as if her words had
illuminated her extraordinary delicacy of being, had made visible all
the infinite refinements of which she was the result. He had a
recurrence of his sense of her incongruity here, balanced on polished
black pattens, against the darkening hills. The sun disappeared, there
was a cool flare of yellow light, and a feeling of impending evening.
The hills were indigo, the forest a dimmer gold, a wind moved audible in
the dry leaves.

Ludowika gasped. "It's so--so huge," she said, "all the lonely miles. At
times I can't bear to think of it." A faint dread invaded him. "Last
night, when I couldn't sleep, a thing howled in the woods. And I got
thinking of those naked men at the Forge, with their eyes rimmed in
black, and--and--"

He disregarded the publicity of their position and put an arm about her
shoulders, in an overwhelming impulse to calm and reassure her; but she
slipped away. "I'll be all right again," she promised; "but I think it's
more cheerful with the candles. We'll get your sister to play Belshazzar
and pretend we're across the green from St. James."