"Have you been there all the time?"
"No. I went in to see Electra."
Rose stopped short in the path between the banks of flowers. It was a still day, and the summer hush of the plot—a velvet stillness where the garden held its breath—made the time momentous to her. Unconsciously she gripped her father's hand.
"She has told you!" she breathed. Her eyes sought his face. MacLeod was looking at her smilingly, fondly even. She shuddered.
"You are a goose, Rose," he said lightly. He released his fingers from the clasp of hers and gave her hand a little shake before he dropped it. "But I can't help it. If you will go on tipping over your saucer of cream, why, you must do it, that's all."
They walked on, and at the steps she paused again, though she heard Peter's voice within.
"You're terribly angry with me, aren't you?" she said, in a low tone, seeming to make it half communion with herself.
"Angry, my girl! Don't say a thing like that."
"You look exactly as you did the night Ivan Gorof defied you—and the next day he died."
MacLeod laughed again, so humorously that Peter, coming forward from the library, his own face serious with unwelcome care, smiled involuntarily and returned to his every-day mood of belief that, on the whole, things go well.