Rose MacLeod

								

home-coming. He had the shattered moment with Electra to remember, and
now he had turned the other great meeting of the day into a fractious
colloquy. Unformed yet vivid in his mind, for the last year, had been
strong, determining anticipations of what would happen when he at last
came home. He had known certainly what would happen when he saw Electra.
She would still be the loveliest and best, and his would be the
privilege of telling her so. And to Osmond, who had dug in the ground
that Peter might work under the eye of men, he would return as one who
has an account to give, and say, in effect, "You did it." But,
laughably, neither of these things had happened. He forgot that he had
in him the beginnings of a great painter in remembering that he had
shown the obtuseness of an ass.
He did not see Electra that night. After the noon dinner he left Rose
and grannie intimately together,--the girl, with a gentle deprecation,
as if she brought gifts not in themselves worth much, talking about
Paris, the air young Peter had been breathing,--and betook himself again
to Electra's house. It was all open to the day, but no one answered his
knock. He went in and wandered from parlor to library, the dignified
rooms that had once seemed to him so typical of her estate as compared
to his own: for in those days he had been only a young man of genius
with scarcely enough money to live and study on, save as his brother
earned it for him. He sauntered in and out for an hour--it seemed as if
even the two servants had gone--and then played snatches at the piano,
to waken drowsy ears. But the house kept its quiet, and in the late
afternoon he wandered home again. That evening he returned, and then
there was some one to answer his knock. The maid told him Miss Electra
had gone out; but though he waited in a fevered and almost an angry
impatience, she did not return. Knowing her austere and literal truth,
he could not believe that the denial was the conventional expedient, and
in a wave of regret over the day, he longed for her inexpressibly. It
seemed to him that no distance would be too great to bring him to her.
He felt in events, and in himself also, the rushing of some force to
separate them, and swung back, after his blame of her, into the
necessity of a more passionate partisanship. When he went home, still
without seeing her, he found his grandmother's house deserted. But the
minute his foot sounded, there was a soft rush down the stairs. Rose
stood beside him in the hall.
"Did you see her?" she asked breathlessly.
He strove to make his laugh an evidence of the reasonableness of what he
had to answer.
"No. She was obliged to be away."
"Isn't she at home now?" asked the girl insistently. "She is there, and
you refuse to hurt me. She won't see me!"
"She is not there," said Peter, in relief at some small truth to tell.
"I haven't seen her since morning."