"I must go," she said again. "He would wish it."
Rose now had her moment of delay. Her mind went back over that weary road, to the past the present had so illumined for her. It tired her to think the trouble ever attendant on her father's life was to go on, ripple after ripple, now that he had sunken into the mystery of things. Once over the horror of his death, there had been a throb of thankfulness that at least an end had been made to his great power of bringing pain. And now here was another life to be thrown into the void after him, another woman to love a dream. She awoke from that momentary musing, to hear Electra saying,—
"You will excuse me, if I go on working? I sail so soon, and I must leave everything in order."
"Electra," said Rose. Then she called her name again, as if appealing to the softest of her moods. "How can I tell you! Electra, you mustn't love my father."
Again that swift smile came to Electra's face. The face itself was all a burning truth. The old crude precision in her seemed suddenly to have flowered into this warm candor that spoke and liked to hear itself disclosing, regardless of its auditor.
"You cannot"—she looked at Rose with happy inspiration, as if she had been the first to make the saying—"you can't kill love with reason."
Again Rose deliberated. When she spoke it was with an air of sad decisiveness.
"Electra," she said wistfully, "did he ask you to marry him?"
"I never thought of it," said Electra at once, in the simplest unreserve. "It would have seemed too small, to limit it and bound it."
"Yes. That is what he would have said, too small. You were a quick pupil."