A smile stole upon Electra's lips.
"We had planned it all," she said. "I was to go to Paris. I was to work with him. Now that he is gone, I must carry on the work for both of us."
Rose regarded her with a wistful compassion, not knowing how much she might help her, and yet wishing to offer all she had.
"Electra," she said, "what do you mean by carrying on the work?"
"His work, the Brotherhood."
"But, dear child, you would have to submit yourself for years and years to all sorts of tests before you would be trusted. I don't even know whether it won't fall apart, now he has gone. It may do that and reorganize in a different form. And how would you find it? You think of it as a definite body with headquarters anybody can reach. Why, Electra, you might stay a dozen years in Paris and not put your finger on it."
Still Electra turned to her that look of rapt allegiance. She heard apparently, yet the words made no impression on her fixed resolve. Now she spoke, and rather sweetly. All the tones of her voice, all her looks, had a reminiscent value, as if they were echoes from her lost relation with him.
"He told me where to write," she said, as if she were satisfied with that. "I shall go there."
"I know, the address for his letters. But he was never there. Now that he is gone, the place will be for other uses. Everything connected with the Brotherhood keeps fluctuating, changing. There would be no safety otherwise."
Electra was looking at her in that removed, patient way that made another woman of her. It was almost like a mother who has cares to think of and can spare no time from them for alien presences.