souls"--Electra began, and stopped. Trouble was upon her
brow. She knew there was a goodly reason for every act he did, yet human
jealousy was in her. She had to seek out arguments. "The great souls are
different," she halted. "They are many-sided. Look at Goethe--"

But Rose had heard that reason. She was tired of it.

"It's a pity they make it so hard for other people," she said wearily.
"Because they are great, must they be greedy, too? But that was my
father. He may have been a great man, but he was not the man you think
him. If you saw him as he was,--he was a big, dominating animal, that's
all."

Electra sat staring at her, condemning, Rose knew, not Markham MacLeod,
but his daughter. The charm of his mastery was still upon her. Rose and
Peter, more mobile than she, had escaped with the cutting of his cord of
life. It was as if they had been under a crude natural magnetism, and
now that the magician had gone into another room, they were free. But
Electra had petrified in the attitude where he had left her. She had a
pitying certainty that Rose had never known him. Something like
indignation came now into her face. She spoke passionately:--

"Why do you want to take it away from me?"

Rose could not answer. Tears were in her eyes from pure pity at the loss
and pain of it all.

"We knew each other so short a time," brooded Electra; and it was
apparent that she believed the relation had been as much to MacLeod as
to her. "Why can't you let me have the comfort of it?"

"If it didn't mean so much time, so much energy wasted! If you wouldn't
devote your life to it,--you might, you know. It's quite like you,
Electra. And that would be a pity; because he was never for a minute
such a person as you think him,--never, Electra, never in the world."

Electra rounded upon her in a flash of indignation.

"Tell me what you think him."

Rose's mind ran back to that first night when, with the daring inspired
in her by their meeting, she had given Osmond a portrait of her father.
Now was the time to paint it again, but, for some reason, she could not.
The man had not changed, but his aims obscured him. Behind them, he was
nothing, but they were large enough to make his monument. Instead of
answering directly, she found herself saying,--

"I have had such letters about him!"

"From the Brotherhood?"

"Yes. And they will keep on coming for a long time now, because it is
everywhere, you know, in far, far-off places. An