Rose MacLeod

								

fitted what seemed to her that skillful preface. "He is quite too great
for that, isn't he, Mr. Stark?"
Billy had no extravagant opinion of Markham MacLeod. He had rather the
natural dubiousness of the inquiring mind toward a man whom the world
delighted to honor and who had, according to dispassionate standards,
done nothing, as yet, save telling others what to do.
"We don't say Mr. Browning often," he concurred, "certainly not Mr.
Shakespeare. But, my dear young lady, I don't forgive your father."
He seated himself, for Electra was now decorously smiling in a chair
that became her. It had a high carved top like Madam Fulton's, and in
these the older woman and the younger looked like the finest-fibred
beings bred out of endurance and strong virtues. Rose was in a low chair
near Madam Fulton's knee. She was leaning forward now, listening in her
receptive way, and Billy Stark looked at her anew and wondered at her
beauty and her grace. But he recalled himself with a sigh, and
remembered it was the old commonplace--youth--and it was not for him.
"You don't forgive my father?" she repeated, with a slightly foreign
accent that came sometimes upon her tongue, no one knew why, whether to
enhance her charm or in unconsciousness. "Why?"
Billy Stark had thrown one of his short legs over the other, and held it
with his well-kept hand.
"He is a renegade," he said. "He began to write, and stopped writing.
You can't expect a publisher to condone that."
Madam Fulton was having a strange pang of liking and envy as she looked
at the girl, one such as she never felt over Electra. Rose for her, too,
had youth, beautiful and pathetic also. As the girl only smiled without
answering, she said kindly,--
"Your father got very much interested in people, didn't he, my dear? the
working classes?"
"Labor," said Electra, as if it were a war-cry.
Madam Fulton glanced at her involuntarily, with a satirical thought.
Electra had a maternal attitude toward her servants, shown, her
grandmother thought, chiefly by interfering in their private lives. She
worked tirelessly at clubs to raise money for labor, and she listened to
the most arid talks on the situation of the day. But did Electra love
her fellowman? Madam Fulton did not know. She had seen no sign of it.
But Rose was returning one of her vague answers that always seemed
significant, and, to any partial ear, quite adequate.
"My father founded what he calls the Brotherhood. He speaks for it. He
works for it. But you know that already."
Stark nodded.
"I know," he said. "It is tremendous. He says to this man 'Come,' and he
cometh, and so on. I should think it would make him lie awake o'
nights."
"No," said Rose, smiling brilliantly in a way she had when the smile had
no honest mirth in it, "my father never lies awake. Responsibility is
the last thing he fears."
Now Electra was smiling upon her so persuasively that Rose bent toward