“It's wonderful!” she proclaimed, and then corroborated all he had surmised about the growth of her interest in him; it had reached forward and back from the killing of Partridge Sinnox. “That was the first time,” she told him, “that I realized you were so—so big. You looked so miserable on the canal boat, coming out here those years ago, that it hardly seemed possible for you merely to live; and when you started the hearths at Tubal Cain everyone who knew anything about iron just laughed at you—we used to go down sometimes and look at those killing workmen you had, and that single mule and old horse. “I wasn't interested then, and I don't know when it happened; but now I can see that a time soon came when men stopped laughing at you. I can just remember when father first became seriously annoyed, when he declared that he was going to force you out of the valleys at once. But it seemed you didn't go. And then in a few months he came home in a dreadful temper, when he found that you controlled all the timber on the mountains. He said of course you would break before he was really short of charcoal. But it seems you haven't broken. And now I'm married to you; I'm Gisela Hulings!” “This is hardly more than the beginning,” he added; “the foundation—just as iron is the base for so much. I—we—are going on,” he corrected the period lamely, but was rewarded by a charming smile. “Power!” he said, shutting up one hand, his straight, fine features as hard as the cameo in his neckcloth. She instantly fired at his tensity of will. “How splendid you are, Alexander!” she cried. “How tremendously satisfactory for a woman to share! You can have no idea what it means to be with a man like a stone wall! “I wish,” she said, “that you would always tell me about your work. I'd like more than anything else to see you going on, step by step up. I suppose it is extraordinary in a woman. I felt that way about father's iron, and he only laughed at me; and yet once I kept a forge daybook almost a week, when a clerk was ill. I think I could be of real assistance to you, Alexander.” He regarded with the profoundest distaste any mingling of his, Alexander Hulings', wife and a commercial industry. He had married in order to give his life a final touch of elegance and proper symmetry. No, no; he wanted Gisela to receive him at the door of his mansion, in fleckless white, as she was now, and jewels, at the end of his day in the clamor and soot of business and put it temporarily from his thoughts. He was distinctly annoyed that her father had permitted her to post the forge book; it was an exceedingly unladylike proceeding. He told her something of this in carefully chosen, deliberate words; and she listened quietly, but with a faint air of disappointment.