nd stretched his legs
before him. As he ruminated, his face fell into lines. Nobody ever saw
them,--even he,--because in public, and before his glass, he had a way
of plumping himself into cheerfulness. His tortuous thoughts were for
his inmost mind. Whatever he planned, no one knew he was planning; only
his results came to him in the eye of the world.

XVII

After supper, which had been, grannie thought, a brilliant occasion,
MacLeod took his hat and said to Peter, with an air of proposing the
simplest possible thing,--

"I am going over to pay my respects to your neighbor."

Peter stared frankly.

"She was so kind as to invite me to luncheon, you know," MacLeod
explained from the doorway. "I want to call at once."

"I'll go with you," said Peter.

"No, no! It's a first occasion. She'll want to catechise me, and you've
heard all the answers. I rather depend on her putting straight
questions."

It was not the custom to wonder at MacLeod. Whatever he did bore the
stamp of privilege. He was "the chief." So he walked away through the
summer dusk, and Peter and Rose, on the veranda, talked Paris while
grannie listened, in a pleasant daze, not always sure, through age's
necromancy, whether all the movement and action of their tone and
subject belonged to the reality they knew, or to her own dream of a land
she never saw.

Electra, the lights turned low, was sitting at the piano, nursing her
discontent. She could hear the murmur of Madam Fulton's voice from the
next room, broken by pauses when the old lady waited for Billy Stark to
laugh. It all made Electra feel very much alone. Perhaps she had gone to
the piano in a tacit emulation of the mastery Rose had shown, to see if,
by a happy miracle, she also could bring to birth some of those magical
things she never knew she felt until she heard others expressing them.
But when she struck a chord, it was no richer and no more responsive
than she remembered it in her old practicing days. Then she tried
singing a little:--

"'Drink to me only with thine eyes.'"

And all the time she was recalling the liquid flow of another voice, its
restrained fervor and dying falls. A thing so beautiful as this song, so
simple, had its root, she began dimly to feel, not in happy love but in
despair, and as it often happened with her, she seemed to be timidly
reaching out chilled fingers toward emotions she feared because they
were so unrestrained, and yet which had to