business in that hasty grasp.
"Let me go home with you."

"If you wish," said Electra. "I suppose you have a right to be there.
They may want you." And in silence they hurried down the path together
and out into the road. At Electra's own gate, she turned to Rose.

"It is strange, isn't it?" she said.

"What, Electra?"

"That he could die."

"Electra, he has not died. No one has died." Rose spoke gently, knowing
that in some way the other woman had been shocked and her reason shaken.
"Come into the house and we'll find Peter."

But at the moment Peter and the doctor appeared together in the doorway,
and the doctor turned to give orders to a servant in the hall. Peter saw
them and came quickly down to them. It was apparent to Rose that
something had happened.

"Tell her, Peter," said Electra, in some impatience. "She won't believe
me. Tell her he is dead."

Peter and Rose stood looking at each other, she questioning and he in
sad assent. Then there crept upon her face a look that was the companion
to Electra's. The color faded, her eyes widened.

"My father?" she breathed, and Peter nodded.

"Yes," said Electra, as if she were astonished at them both and their
dull wits, "Markham MacLeod is dead."

That evening grannie was in her own room, and Peter and Rose, below,
talked intermittently of that strange morning.

"It is incredible, Peter, isn't it," she began, "for him to die like
this?"

He nodded.

"I expected violence," he said. "We all expected it."

"Isn't it strange, too, that I can't feel grief! I'm neither glad nor
sorry. I feel very still."

"The whole world will feel grief," said Peter loyally.

"Yes, but to me--Peter, it is just as if he were not a man, not
something I had loved, but a thing that was great to look at and had no
soul. It was like a tree falling, or a huge rock undermined. Don't you
see? As if it were the natural thing, and there was no other way
possible."

She began to feel the inexorability of great revenges, and to see that
when a soul has for a long time denied us answer in our needs, we refuse
to believe that it can speak. MacLeod had grown to be a beautiful
spectacle of the universe, full of natural health and power. Now that he
had fallen, there was nothing left. She had no vestige to remember of
those responses in the dim reaches of being when one calls and another
answers: homely loyalties, sweet kindnesses, even overlaid by later
pain. He had lived what he cal