Rose MacLeod. Alice Brown

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СКАЧАТЬ we ask her to stay,—you, or, if she is not to expect anything from you, I. She has nothing of her own, poor girl."

      "Has her father repudiated her? That ought to tell something."

      Peter was silent for a moment. Then he said in an engaging honesty, bound as it was to hurt his own cause,—

      "I don't know. I don't understand their relation altogether. Rose gives no opinions, but I fancy she is not in sympathy with him."

      "Yes, I fancied so."

      "But we mustn't fancy so. We mustn't get up an atmosphere and look through it till we see distorted facts."

      "Those are what I want, Peter, facts. If Miss MacLeod—"

      "Do you mean you won't even give her your brother's name?"

      "Even, Peter! What could be more decisive?"

      "Do you expect me to introduce her as Miss MacLeod? Do you expect me to call her so?"

      "I fancied you called her Rose."

      "I did. I do. I began it in those unspeakable days when Tom went out of his head with fright and fever and we held him down in bed. Electra!"

      She was listening.

      "Was that grandmother calling?" she asked, though grandmother never yet had summoned her for companionship or service. But Electra felt her high decorum failing her. She was tired with the impact of emotion, and it was a part of her creed never to confess to weakness. She had snatched at the slight subterfuge as if it were a sustaining draught. "I am afraid I must go."

      "Electra!" He placed himself before her with outstretched hands. Very simple emotions were talking in him. They told him that this was the second day of his return, that he was her lover, and he had not kissed her. And they told him also, to his sheer fright and bewilderment, that he did not want to kiss her. All he could ineffectually do was to reiterate, "We can't go on like this. Nothing in the world is worth it." Yet while he said it, he knew there was one thing at least infinitely worth while: to right the wrongs of a beautiful and misjudged lady. Only it was necessary, apparently, for the present, to keep the lady out of the question.

      Electra was listening.

      "It is grandmother," she said recklessly. "I must go."

      There was a rustle up the staircase, and he was alone in the library, to take himself home as he might.

VI

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      After a week Electra had made no sign toward acceptance of the unbidden guest. She received Peter sweetly and kindly whenever he went to see her, but he felt they were very far apart. Something had been destroyed; the bubble of pleasure was broken and, as it seemed, for good and all. He strove to find his way back into their lost dream and take her with him; but there was no visible path. Rose spared him questions. She stayed gratefully on, and grannie was delighted with her. Rose had such a way of fitting into circumstance that it seemed an entirely natural thing to have her there, and Peter forgot to wonder even at the pleasure of it. Twice she came in from a walk pale and inexplicably excited, and he knew she had been besieging the scornful lady in the other house. But she kept her counsel. She had never seen Osmond since her coming, though she knew he and Peter had long talks together at the plantation.

      One night, a cold, unseasonable one, Osmond was alone in the shack, his room unlighted save by the flaring wood. The cabin had a couch, two chairs, and a big table, this covered with books. There were books on the wall, and the loft above, where he slept when he was not in his neighboring tent, made a balcony, taking half the room. He was in his long chair stretched among the shadows, his face lighted intermittently from the fire. He was thinking deeply, his black brows drawn together, his nervous hands gripped on the elbows of the chair. There was a slight tap at the door. He did not heed it, being used to mice among the logs and birds twittering overhead. Then the door opened, and a lady came in. Osmond half rose from his chair, and leaning forward, looked at her. He knew her, and yet strangely he had no belief that she was real. It was Rose, a long cloak about her, the hood slipped back from her rich hair. Her face was flushed by the buffeting of the wind, and its moist sweetness tingled with health. It was apparent to him at once that, as he was looking at her in the firelight, she also had fixed his face in the gloom. She was smiling at him, and her eyes were kind. Then she spoke.

      "I came to see you, Mr. Osmond Grant."

      Osmond was now upon his feet. He drew a chair into the circle of light.

      "Let me take your cloak," he said. It seemed to him that no such exciting thing had ever happened.

      "No, no. It isn't wet." She tossed it on the bench by the door, and having put both hands to her hair with the reassuring touch that is pretty in women, she turned to him, a radiant creature smiling out of her black drapery. "But I'll sit down," she said.

      The next moment, he hardly knew how it was, they were there by the fire, and he had accepted her. She was beautiful and wonderful, a thing to be worshiped, and he lost not a minute in telling himself he worshiped her, and that he was going to do it while he was man and she was woman, or after his clay had lost its spirit. Osmond had very little time to think of his soul, because he worked all day in the open and slept hard at night; but it always seemed to him reasonable that he had one. Now it throbbed up, invincible, and he looked at the lady and wondered again at her. The lady was smiling at him.

      "I wanted to meet you," she said, in her soft, persuasive voice. "You don't come to the house any more."

      He answered her simply and calmly, with no token of his inward turmoil.

      "I haven't been there for some days."

      "Is it because I am there?"

      "Grannie hasn't needed me."

      "Is it because I am there?"

      Then he smiled at her, with a gleam of white teeth and lighted eyes.

      "I've been a little afraid of you," he owned.

      "Well, you're not now?"

      "No, I'm not now."

      "That's what I came here for." She settled more snugly into the chair, and folded her hands on her knee. He looked at them curiously, their slender whiteness, and noted, with interest, that she had no wedding ring. She continued, "I got breathless in the house. Grandmother was tired and went to bed. Peter has gone to see his cruel lady."

      "Why do you call her cruel?"

      "She won't hold out her hand to me."

      That simple and audacious candor overwhelmed him. He had never known anything so facile yet direct. It made life incredibly picturesque and full of color. He laughed from light-heartedness, and it came into his head that, in her company, it would be easy to believe "as many as six impossible things before breakfast." But she was continuing:—

      "Don't you find her cruel?"

      "Electra? We haven't exchanged a dozen words in a year."

      "Why СКАЧАТЬ