It was not strange to Peter to hear him speak of her familiarly. He returned,—
"I've been thinking of her, too."
XXVIII
The deed was over. The great emotional wave that mounted, in Europe and America, at the death of Markham MacLeod, threw its spray upon this quiet shore. Letters came from his disciples and his lovers, and Rose, wondering as she read them, answered in a patient duty. If a great man is one who moves things, then her father had been great. He was bigger to her now than when she feared him. Though there were mutterings afar of what must come now Markham MacLeod was dead, this country spot took on its old tranquillity. Peter sat in the garden and painted. He seemed to think of nothing else. Rose was too busy to sit, and he began a portrait of grannie; then his only communication with the world seemed to be his flashing glance at her and at his canvas. Osmond, in the plantation, bent his back and worked with the men, and no one knew what he thought. To Peter he was gravely kind, and Rose, with a growing emotion that seemed to her likely to become terror in the end, realized that he had not sought her.
One morning while Peter was in the garden smoking, before he called grannie to her chair again, and Rose was at the library table answering letters, Madam Fulton appeared at the door.
"Where's Bessie Grant?" she asked.
Rose was at once on her feet and came forward to give her a chair, relieve her of her parasol, and stand beside her in a deferential waiting that, for some reason, never displeased this pulsating age with its memory ever upon the habitudes of youth.
"Where's Bessie Grant?"
"She will be in presently. Peter is painting her."