married."

"No," said Madam Fulton absently, still considering, "I don't want to be
married. Harsh measures never did attract me. But I'd like very well to
be engaged. Tell you what, Billy, we could be engaged for the summer,
and when you go back to England we'll call it off."

Billy rose, and possessed himself of one of her hands. He kissed it
ceremoniously, and returned it to its tatting.

"You do me infinite honor," he announced, with more gravity than she
liked.

"Don't get too serious, Billy," she said quickly. "It'll remind us of
being young, and mercy knows that isn't what we want."

"May I inform your granddaughter?" asked the gentleman gravely.

"No, no, I'll do it. That's half the fun."

At that moment Electra came in. She was dressed in white, as usual, but
her ordinary dignified simplicity seemed overlaid, to the old lady's
satirical gaze, with an added smoothness of glossy surfaces. Her dress
fell in simple folds. She seemed to have clothed herself to meet a moral
emergency. Her face was pale in its determination. She was like a New
England maiden led to sacrifice and bound, at all hazards, to do her
conscience credit. Madam Fulton, seeing her, hardened her heart. There
were few pirouettes she would not have essayed at that moment to plague
her granddaughter.

"Electra, my dear," she said, in a silken voice, "we have something to
tell you, Mr. Stark and I. We have become engaged."

Electra looked from one to the other, not even incredulity in her gaze,
all a reproachful horror. Yet Electra did not for a moment admit the
possibility of a joke on such a subject. She saw her grandmother, as she
often did, peering down paths that led to madness, and even, as in this
case, taking one.

"Please do not mention it," grandmother was saying smoothly. "The
engagement is not to be announced--not yet."

Electra could not look at Billy Stark, even in reproof. The situation
was too intolerable. And at that moment, flushed from her walk, eager,
deprecating as she had to be in this unfriendly spot, Rose came in. She
went straight to Madam Fulton, as if she were the recognized head of the
house.

"It was so good of you," she said. "I am so glad to come." Then she
turned to Electra and Billy Stark with her quick, beautiful smile and
her inclusive greeting. This was not the same woman who had run away to
trysts under the tree, or even the woman Peter had seen when she
returned, glowing, lovely, as if from a bat