But, at the same time--you comprehend: folly not to push
the boy on fast as possible. No reason for us all to go through with
the hardships of the first Gilbert and his times. Must have been
fatiguing, the wilderness and English troubles and all that."
"Splendid, I should say," Jasper Penny replied. He repeated satirically
the conversation he had heard above. "Makes me ill. You will remember
there was a Howat, son of our original settler--now he must have been a
lad! Married some widow or other; wild at first, but made iron in the
end."
"A black Penny, Jasper; resembled you. Personally, I like it better
now." Jasper Penny surveyed with approbation Stephen's full, handsome
presence. Jannan was a successful, a big, man. Well, so was he too. But
he thought with keen longing of the time when he was twenty-one, and
free, free to roam self-sufficient. He thought of that Howat Penny of
which they had spoken, black as he was black in the family tradition; he
had seen Hesselius's portrait of the other; and, but for the tied hair
and continental buff, it might have been a replica of himself. It was
curious--that dark strain of Welsh blood, cropping out undiminished,
concrete, after generations. The one to hold it before Howat had been
burned in Mary's time, in the sixteenth century, dead almost three
hundred years.
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