All sorrow for himself had gone under.
Isabel Penny returned to the drawing room, and moved about, her flowered
silk at once gay and obscure in the semidarkness. "The fire, Howat," she
directed; "it's all but out." He stirred the logs into a renewed blaze.
A warm gilding flickered over Ludowika; she smiled at him, relaxed,
content. He was surprised that she could not see the tumultuous feeling
overpowering him. He had heard that women were immediately aware of
such emotion. But he realized that she had been lulled into a false
sense of security, of present immunity from "the old, old thing," by her
own placidity. He did not know when his mother left the room. He
wondered continuously when it would happen, when the bolt would fall,
what she would do. Howat was hot and cold, and possessed by a subtle
sense of improbity, a feeling resembling that of a doubtful advance
through the dark, for a questionable end. This was the least part of
him, insignificant; his passion grew constantly stronger, more brutal.
In a last, vanishing trace of his superior consciousness he recognized
that the thing must have happened to him as it did; it was the price of
his more erect pride, his greater contempt, his solitary and unspent
state.
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