"I have not seen Osmond yet."
"Wasn't he there to meet you?"
"No. Grannie said I should have to go down to the plantation, to find him. Does he keep up his old ways, Electra?"
"Yes. Sleeping practically out of doors summer and winter, or in the shack, as he calls it,—that log hut he put up years ago. Haven't you known about him? Hasn't he written?"
"Oh, he writes, but not about himself. Osmond wouldn't do that. Somehow grandmother never wrote any details about him either. I fancied he didn't want her to. So I never asked. She only said he was 'well.' You know Osmond always says that himself."
"I believe he is well," said Electra absently. She was thinking of the alien presence at the other house. "He looks it—strong, tanned. Osmond is very impressive somehow. It's fortunate he wasn't a little man."
Peter made one of the quick gestures he had learned since he had been away from her. They told the tale of give and take with a more mobile people. He could not ask her to ignore Osmond's deformity, yet he could not bear to hear her speak of it. Osmond was, he thought, a colossal figure, to be accepted, whatever his state, like the roughened rock that builds the wall. He rose, terminating, without his conscious will, an interview that was to have lasted, if she had gone to the other house with him and he had returned again with her, the day long.
"I must see Osmond," he hesitated.
Electra, too, had risen.
"Yes," she said conformably, though the table, she knew, would be laid for them both in what had promised to be their lovers' seclusion.