She is beautiful, Electra."
Electra was looking at him thoughtfully.
"Did she persuade you to join the Brotherhood?" she asked.
"No," said Peter, unmoved, "the chief himself persuaded me. I went to a great meeting one Sunday night. I heard him. That was the end of me. I knew where I belonged."
Electra, her mind hidden from him as completely as if a veil had fallen between them, was, he could see, considering him. As for her, he hardly dared dwell upon her as she ruthlessly seemed. She was again like the bright American air, too determinate, too sharp. She almost hurt the eyes. He wondered vaguely over several things he was unwilling to ask her, since he could not bear to bring their difference to a finished issue: why she cherished a boundless belief in the father and only reprobation for the daughter, when she had seen neither the one nor the other; why she had this vivid enthusiasm for the charity that embraces the world and none for a friendless child at her door. Their interview seemed to have dropped flat in inconceivable collapse; what was to have been the beginning of their dual life was only the encounter of a hand-to-hand discussion. He tried to summon back the vividness to his fagged emotions, and gave it up. Then he ventured to think of his imperial lady, and found a satirical note beating into his mind. He took refuge in the practical.
"I have not seen Osmond yet."
"Wasn't he there to meet you?"
"No. Grannie said I should have to go down to the plantation, to find him. Does he keep up his old ways, Electra?"
"Yes. Sleeping practically out of doors summer and winter, or in the shack, as he calls it,—that log hut he put up years ago. Haven't you known about him? Hasn't he written?"
"Oh, he writes, but not about himself. Osmond wouldn't do that. Somehow grandmother never wrote any details about him either. I fancied he didn't want her to. So I never asked. She only said he was 'well.' You know Osmond always says that himself."
"I believe he is well," said Electra absently. She was thinking of the alien presence at the other house. "He looks it—strong, tanned. Osmond is very impressive somehow. It's fortunate he wasn't a little man."
Peter made one of the quick gestures he had learned since he had been away from her. They told the tale of give and take with a more mobile people. He could not ask her to ignore Osmond's deformity, yet he could not bear to hear her speak of it. Osmond was, he thought, a colossal figure, to be accepted, whatever his state, like the roughened rock that builds the wall. He rose, terminating, without his conscious will, an interview that was to have lasted, if she had gone to the other house with him and he had returned again with her, the day long.
"I must see Osmond," he hesitated.
Electra, too, had risen.
"Yes," she said conformably, though the table, she knew, would be laid for them both in what had promised to be their lovers' seclusion.
"I will come back. This afternoon, Electra?"
That morning, the afternoon had been his and hers only. She had expected to listen to the recital of his triumphs in Paris, and to scan eagerly the map of his prospects which was to show her way also. And she too opened her lips and spoke without preconsidered intent.
"This afternoon I shall be busy. I have to go in town."
"You won't—" he hesitated again. "Electra, you won't call at the house on the way, and see her, at least?"
"Your Rose?" She smiled at him brilliantly. "Not to-day, Peter."
Then, bruised, bewildered, he went back over the path he had come, leaving his imperial lady to go in and order the luncheon table prepared for one.
"Madam Fulton will not be home," she said to the maid, with a proud unconsciousness; and for the moment it sounded as if Madam Fulton had been the expected guest.
IV
When Peter went up the steps of his grandmother's house, he found Mrs. Grant still on the veranda, and Rose beside her. The girl looked at him eagerly, as if she besought him for whatever message he had, and he answered the glance with one warmed by implied sympathy. Until he saw her, he had not realized that anger made any part in the emotion roused in him by his imperial lady. Now he remembered how this gracious young creature seemed to him, so innocent, so sad. He felt a rising in his throat, as he thought of subjecting her to unfriendly judgment. Rose, in spite of the serious cast of her face and the repose of her figure, wore an ineffable air of youth. She had splendid shoulders and a yielding waist, and her fine hands lay like a separate beauty in the lap of her black dress. She had the profile of a coin touched with finer human graces, a fullness of the upper lip, a slight waving of the soft chestnut hair over the low forehead, and lashes too dark for harmony with the gray eyes. There were defects in her flawlessness. Her mouth was large, in spite of its pout, and on her nose were a few beguiling freckles. At that moment, in her wayward beauty, lighted by the kindled eye of expectation, she seemed to Peter to be made up of every creature's best. His grandmother smiled at him out of her warm placidity, and though Rose still drew his eyes to her, he was aware that she did not mean to question him.
"Electra has to go in town," he volunteered. "She won't be back. Perhaps not to-night."
"You must stay here with us, my dear," said Mrs. Grant. "Peter, have her trunks moved into the west chamber."
Still the girl's eyes seemed to interrogate him, and Peter sat down in a chair and twined his long fingers in and out. He felt the drop in temperature ready to chill the voyager who, after the lonely splendor of the sea, returns to the earth as civil life has made it.
"We must remember she hadn't heard of you," he assured Rose blunderingly, out of his depression.
"No. He had not written." She made the statement rather as that of a fact they shared together, and he nodded. "I am afraid it is unwelcome to her, the idea of me."
"She doesn't know you," he assured her, in the same bungling apology. He expected her to betray some wound to her pride, but she only looked humble and a little crushed.
Grannie had apparently not heard, and she said now, with her lovely gentleness,—
"Don't you want to go upstairs, my dear, and be by yourself a little while? You have been traveling so far. We have noon dinner, you know. That will seem funny to you. Mary is getting it, but Peter will show you a room."
Peter found her bag in the wide hall, darkened from the sun, and went with her up the stairs. At the head she paused and beckoned him to the window-seat over the front door.
"Set it down there," she said rapidly, touching the bag with a finger. "Tell me—how did she receive it?"
"What?"
"You know. The news of me."
"She was surprised."
"Naturally. But what else? She was shocked!"
"It was a shock, of course. In its suddenness, you know. You'd expect that."
She sank
