At the house she led the way into the vine-shaded sitting-room where Madam Fulton and Stark had been engaged for an hour in a battle delightful to them both. Madam Fulton sat beautifully upright in a straight-backed chair, and her old friend, with her permission, lay upon a bamboo couch, where he held his eyeglass by its ribbon in one outstretched hand and gesticulated with it, while he urged torrentially upon her the rights of a publisher to the confidence of his author. Now he came to his feet and stood punctiliously.
"Ah!" said Madam Fulton. She had remembered a little lack in her reception of Rose when, hot and tired from her journey, she had found her in the house. "So here is our young lady again. I have been wondering why we haven't seen you, my dear."
While Rose, in her grateful sweetness, was bowing over her hand, Electra had said to the gentleman, with the air of its being quite the usual thing to say,—
"You know all about Markham MacLeod, Mr. Stark. This is the daughter of Markham MacLeod."
Somehow, save to Rose, it seemed an adequate presentation, and that instant Stark was bowing before her.
"I can't say Mr. MacLeod," Electra added, with the elaborate grace that fitted what seemed to her that skillful preface. "He is quite too great for that, isn't he, Mr. Stark?"
Billy had no extravagant opinion of Markham MacLeod. He had rather the natural dubiousness of the inquiring mind toward a man whom the world delighted to honor and who had, according to dispassionate standards, done nothing, as yet, save telling others what to do.
"We don't say Mr. Browning often," he concurred, "certainly not Mr. Shakespeare. But, my dear young lady, I don't forgive your father."
He seated himself, for Electra was now decorously smiling in a chair that became her. It had a high carved top like Madam Fulton's, and in these the older woman and the younger looked like the finest-fibred beings bred out of endurance and strong virtues. Rose was in a low chair near Madam Fulton's knee. She was leaning forward now, listening in her receptive way, and Billy Stark looked at her anew and wondered at her beauty and her grace. But he recalled himself with a sigh, and remembered it was the old commonplace—youth—and it was not for him.
"You don't forgive my father?" she repeated, with a slightly foreign accent that came sometimes upon her tongue, no one knew why, whether to enhance her charm or in unconsciousness. "Why?"