The bellows ceased to sigh. Bereft of its breath, the riotous white flaring of the forge fire sank suddenly into a listless yellow flame and a dull tawny coal. The shop, transformed from the vividly illuminated interior presented but a moment ago, was a shadowy, cavernous place, suffused with a dusky red glow that barely served to show the anvil, the black hood, the sombre suggestions of wall and roof, and the figures of the two startled men. One still reached upward to the bellows; the other stood with the hammer in his hand, his figure alert and tense against the dim fire, that cast a fluctuating, feeble glimmer upon their faces. Outside the wind went howling by; the torrents were tossed hither and thither in its tempestuous, devious course, and drove heavily before it. Some freakish spirit of the air seemed to catch the shutter in Marcella’s grasp, striving to tear it from her; she vainly sought to tighten her hold, feeling like one in a dream, who tries to move, and finds in dismay a hopeless breach between the will and the muscles; but the next moment the fickle blast was gone, leaving the frail batten trembling but passive in her hand. She stared with dilated eyes into the ill-lighted place; her surprise was redoubled as she noticed the evident agitation of the men, and became impressed anew with the strangeness of their presence here at this hour,—their inexplicable intrusion upon the smith’s prerogative. It was she who was first enabled to speak. “Whar’s Clem Sanders?” she demanded, in a tone of reprehension and accusation, her voice lifted that it might be heard above the iteration of the rain on the roof and the wild skirl of the wind as it came and went. So great was the repulsion which Jake Baintree inspired, and her shrinking from the knowledge of his dolorous record of suspicion and imprisonment and ostracism, which branded him with the shame and the cruelty of a crime of which the verdict of the jury declared him innocent, that it was not at his jail-bleached face, distinct amongst the shadows, that she looked, but at the stranger, still motionless beside the anvil, on which the hot metal had cooled to a dull tint, and still with the hammer in his hand, gazing silently at her. He did not answer; he turned his head slightly and looked at Baintree, as if referring the question to him,—a well-shaped head, with the hair cut so close upon it that the light, striking upward, barely indicated its reddish-yellow tint. Marcella reluctantly followed his glance to Jake Baintree’s face, which was suddenly instinct with his wonted sly intelligence. “Why, howdy, Marcelly,” he said, as casually as if they had met on the roadside in the summer sunshine. “War ye a-wantin’ ter see Clem?”