Rose MacLeod

								

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