Rose MacLeod

								

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 not?"
"I'm not a notability. It's not remarkable to raise seeds for sale."
"But isn't she cruel?"
He thought a moment, and then answered gravely,--
"She is very opinionated. But she has high ideals. She would be
unyielding. Has she been unyielding to you?"