He stretched out his hand like a bluff comrade and she put hers into it as frankly.
"You're a dear boy, Peter," she said, and her eyes were wet.
He spoke perversely, when she had taken her hand away:—
"That's all very well, you know, but I'm not a boy—not all the time. I love you awfully, Rose, in the real way, the bang-up old style, Tristan and all that, you know. I'm going to keep on and you'll have to listen."
"Shall I, Peter?" She was still smiling wistfully. Love, sweet, clean, young love looked very beautiful to her. She wished she could see it crowning some head, not hers, some girl quite worthy of him. "Well, not to-day."
"No, maybe not to-day," Peter agreed obstinately, "but other days, all the days. I can't give up the most beautiful thing there is, and you're that. You're simply the most beautiful there is."
"There's grannie coming out on the veranda." Then she added bitterly, "I wonder if she will think I am the most beautiful thing there is!"
XXI
MacLeod was not used to being summoned, except by high officials, and then if the meeting would not advantage his cause, he was likely to take a journey in another direction. But when Osmond's man invited him to go down to the shack that morning, he had agreed with a ready emphasis, and now walked along, smiling over the general kindliness of things. The change of air after his sea voyage was doing him good, and he had been able to command anew the sense of physical prosperity which had once been his habitual possession. That forbade him morbid premonitions and withdrawals relative to the bodily life. It hardly seemed possible, this robust guardian declared, that anything should happen to him, save after a very long period, when inevitable decay would set in. But in a harmonious mood and prospect retreated so far that it might almost as well not threaten at all. He had no doubt that when change fell upon the aged, it was as beneficent in its approach as the oncoming of sleep. But of these things he need not think, except as they might be brought to his mind by the disasters of other people. Acquiesce in the course of nature, said his philosophy, and refuse to anticipate trouble as trouble. It could always be curbed or stamped out when it came. That abounding certainty was a part of his power.