"Electra has to go in town," he volunteered. "She won't be back. Perhaps not to-night."
"You must stay here with us, my dear," said Mrs. Grant. "Peter, have her trunks moved into the west chamber."
Still the girl's eyes seemed to interrogate him, and Peter sat down in a chair and twined his long fingers in and out. He felt the drop in temperature ready to chill the voyager who, after the lonely splendor of the sea, returns to the earth as civil life has made it.
"We must remember she hadn't heard of you," he assured Rose blunderingly, out of his depression.
"No. He had not written." She made the statement rather as that of a fact they shared together, and he nodded. "I am afraid it is unwelcome to her, the idea of me."
"She doesn't know you," he assured her, in the same bungling apology. He expected her to betray some wound to her pride, but she only looked humble and a little crushed.
Grannie had apparently not heard, and she said now, with her lovely gentleness,—
"Don't you want to go upstairs, my dear, and be by yourself a little while? You have been traveling so far. We have noon dinner, you know. That will seem funny to you. Mary is getting it, but Peter will show you a room."
Peter found her bag in the wide hall, darkened from the sun, and went with her up the stairs. At the head she paused and beckoned him to the window-seat over the front door.
"Set it down there," she said rapidly, touching the bag with a finger. "Tell me—how did she receive it?"