d,
MacLeod turned to Rose.

"Well," he said, "you don't look very fit."

Rose had one of her frequent impulses to tell him the crude truth: to
say now, "I did until you came." But she answered indifferently,--

"I'm very well."

They walked along in silence for a moment, and she felt the return of
old aches, old miseries he always summoned for her. In the first moment
of seeing him, she always recurred to the other days when to be with him
was to be in heaven. Nobody ever had so blest a time as she in the
simple charm of his good-will. No matter what she was doing, for him to
call her, to hold out a finger, had been enough. She would forsake the
world and run, and she never remembered the world again until he loosed
the spell. It was broken now, she thought, effectively, but still at
these first moments her heart yearned back to the old playgrounds, the
old lure.

"What did she call you," he was asking--"Madam Fulton? Mrs. Tom?"

"Yes," said Rose, with a quiet bitterness, "Mrs. Tom."

"Have they accepted you?"

She raised her eyebrows and looked at him.

"You heard," she answered.

"Extraordinary people! Who is Electra? I couldn't call her anything.
Everybody was saying Electra."

"She is Madam Fulton's granddaughter. She and Peter are engaged."

"Ah! I'd forgotten that. I rather fancied it was you--with Peter."

She summoned the resolution to meet him bluntly.

"Don't do that, please. Don't assume anything of the sort about me."

He went on with unbroken good humor. She had never seen him angry, but
the possibility of it, some hidden force suspected in him, quelled her,
of late, when she considered the likelihood of rousing it.

"No, of course not," he said, with his habitual geniality. "Why aren't
you staying with them?"

She temporized, only from the general certainty that it was unsafe for
him to know too much.

"Peter asked me to stay there. His grandmother is very kind. I like
her."

"Ah! Have these people money?"

"What people?"

"Electra. Tom's family in general."

"I don't know."

"They must have. They have the air. Will they do anything for you?"

Her face contracted. The look of youth had fled and left her haggard.

"I have not accepted anything."

"Have they offered it?"

"No."

"There! you see! No doubt they will."

"Why did you come over here?" she cried irrepressibly.

But he ignored the question.

"The prince is much disturbed about you," he volunteered, throwing