stion to ask.

"Where is MacLeod?"

A look like hope flashed into her face. She stopped and turned half
about, as if for instant flight back to the house.

"Was he coming to me?" she asked breathlessly.

"We thought he might be there."

"Did he say he was coming?" Her eagerness looked like hunger for a
desired good, slipping, by some chance, away from her.

"No! no! he may have gone to the plantation. I'll run down there and
find him."

He hurried on, and Electra, watching his light, easy lopes, wished she,
too, were a man and running to find Markham MacLeod.

At the pasture-bars, in a bed of roadside fern, Peter found him. MacLeod
lay majestically, stretched at length, upon his side, as if some one had
disposed him in the attitude of sleep. Peter knew. Yet he stooped and
touched one of the beautifully shaped hands with his finger. He stood
there a long time, it seemed to him, looking not at the figure at his
feet, but off into the morning sky, and MacLeod was not in his mind:
only Osmond and what Osmond had said about the lust for fight. Osmond
seemed to fill the world. He had wished to kill the man, but God instead
had killed him. Yet the other thing might have been. Peter wondered that
he had not realized what his brother was to him, and again that he had
too often foregone Osmond's companionship, this summer of their reunion,
for lesser loyalties. He comprehended him, at the moment, with an
exaggerated passion that was pain: a gigantic figure, all sacrifice, all
patient truthfulness, and, in its own bounded life, as much to be loved
and protected as a woman, and yet untrained and ready for a savage deed.
And all the time Electra was advancing rapidly toward him on the road,
aimlessly, but, as she afterwards believed, drawn by some premonition of
what she was to find. Her approach broke Peter's fearful vision. She was
like a figure walking into his dream, and he hurried toward her,
remembering what she must not see. He motioned to her harshly with his
hand.

"Go back!" he called.

But Electra came inevitably on. Then Peter placed himself before her.

"Something has happened," he said quietly, while she looked him in the
face. "Go home."

But now she was gazing past him, and the figure in the bracken caught
her sight. With a low cry, the inarticulate sound that throws suffering
woman back to her kinship with the mother brute, she ran past him and
stooped over MacLeod; Peter, dull with feeling, thought s