Beyond the dam the path--he had left the road that connected Forge and
Furnace for a more direct way--followed the broad, rippling course of
the Canary, the stream that supplied the life of Myrtle Forge. He
automatically avoided the breaks in the rough trail; his mind, a dark
and confused chamber, still lighted by appalling flashes of memory. A
thing as slight, as incalculable, as a loose flint had been all that
prevented.... He wondered if Fanny and Thomas Gilkan were right in their
shared conviction; Fanny half persuaded, but the elder with a finality
stamped with an accent of the heroic. Whether or not they were right
didn't concern him, he decided; his only problem was to keep outside
all such entanglements. And at present he wanted to sleep.
The path left the creek and joined the road that swept about the face of
the dwelling at Myrtle Forge. The lawn, squarely raised from the public
way by a low brick terrace, showed the length of house behind the
dipping, horizontal branches, the beginning, pale gold, of a widespread
beech. It was a long structure of but two stories, built solidly out of
a dark, flinty stone with an indefinite pinkish glow against the lush
sod and sombre, flat greenery of a young English ivy about a narrow,
stiff portico.
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