Rose had one of her frequent impulses to tell him the crude truth: to say now, "I did until you came." But she answered indifferently,—
"I'm very well."
They walked along in silence for a moment, and she felt the return of old aches, old miseries he always summoned for her. In the first moment of seeing him, she always recurred to the other days when to be with him was to be in heaven. Nobody ever had so blest a time as she in the simple charm of his good-will. No matter what she was doing, for him to call her, to hold out a finger, had been enough. She would forsake the world and run, and she never remembered the world again until he loosed the spell. It was broken now, she thought, effectively, but still at these first moments her heart yearned back to the old playgrounds, the old lure.
"What did she call you," he was asking—"Madam Fulton? Mrs. Tom?"
"Yes," said Rose, with a quiet bitterness, "Mrs. Tom."
"Have they accepted you?"
She raised her eyebrows and looked at him.
"You heard," she answered.
"Extraordinary people! Who is Electra? I couldn't call her anything. Everybody was saying Electra."
"She is Madam Fulton's granddaughter. She and Peter are engaged."