"Your work is
tremendous, Jim," she replied; "the only stirring thing I have ever
known in a particularly silly world. But you mustn't let it run you,
too, into steel rails. President Polder," she smiled brilliantly at him.
"Why not?" queried James, the sanguine, at once defiant, haggard and
intense.
XXXII
The following day Howat Penny was both weary and irritable. Mariana
declared, remorsefully, that she had selfishly dragged him away from
Shadrach; and proposed countless trivial amends, which he fretfully
blocked. He had no intention of affording her such a ready escape from a
sense, he hoped, of error and responsibility. Before dinner, however, he
found himself walking with her over the deep green sod that reached to
the public road below. A mock orange hedge enclosed his lawn, bounding
the cross roads, the upper course leading to Myrtle Forge; and beyond
they passed, on the left, the collapsed stone walls and fallen shingles
of what, evidently, had been a small blacksmith's shed. Farther along
they came to the sturdy shell of an old, single-room building, erected,
perhaps, when Shadrach Furnace was new, with weeds climbing through the
rotten floor, and a fragment of steps, rising to the mouldering peak of
a loft, still clinging to a wall.
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