The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rose MacLeod, by Alice Brown

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Title: Rose MacLeod

Author: Alice Brown

Illustrator: W. W. Churchill, Jr.

Release Date: April 24, 2010 [EBook #32115]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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ROSE MACLEOD

BY ALICE BROWN

WITH A FRONTISPIECE
By W. W. CHURCHILL, Jr.

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT 1907 AND 1908 BY ALICE BROWN

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Published April 1908_

[Illustration: Rose MacLeod]

ROSE MACLEOD

I

Madam Fulton and her granddaughter Electra were sitting at the
breakfast-table. It was a warm yet inspiriting day in early spring, and,
if the feel and look of it were not enough, the garden under the
dining-room windows told the season's hour like a floral clock. The
earliest blossoms had been pushed onward by the mounting spirit of the
year, and now the firstlings of May were budding. The great Georgian
house, set in the heart of this processional bloom, showed the mellow
tints of time. It had an abundant acreage, diversified, at first hand,
not only by this terraced garden in the rear, but by another gone to
wild abandon on the west, and an orchard stretching away into level
fields and, beyond them, groves of pine.

These dining-room windows, three of them, side by side, and now
unshaded, gave large outlook on a beautiful and busy world where the
terrace mounted in green, to be painted later with red peony balls, and
where the eye, still traveling, rested in satisfaction on the fringe of
locusts at the top.

Inside the house the sense of beauty could be fully fed. Here was a
sweet consistency, the sacred past in untouched being, that time when
furniture was made in England, and china was the product of long voyages
and solemn hoarding in corner cabinets with diamond panes. Life here was
reflected dimly from polished surfaces and serenely accentuated