ill tell you those
things, if I am not here."

If he were not there! Her wings of pleasure drooped. It seemed as if he
were always to be there. And Peter! he looked like a small and callow
personage seen through the diminishing end of a glass, compared with
this great presence.

"I must go," he said, and Electra pulled herself out of her maze. "May I
tell my daughter you accept her?" He made it all very delicate and yet
prosaic, as if he quite understood Rose could hardly expect to be
received without difficulty, but as if Electra had made it magnificently
possible. Still she felt a little recoil.

"I can't talk about it," she faltered, "to her. I could to you. Let me
settle all the details, and my lawyer shall submit them to you. Would
that satisfy you?"

She spoke humbly, and Markham MacLeod, the chief of the Brotherhood,
bent over her hand and touched it with his lips. Then he was gone, and
Electra was left standing with that incredibly precious kiss upon her
hand. She was poor in imagination, but at the instant it flashed into
her mind that this was actually the touch of the coal red from the
altar.

Markham MacLeod, walking with long strides through the summer night,
drew in deep breaths, and delighted, for the moment, in the
voluptuousness of his own good health and the wonder that he had been
able to carry youth on into middle age. He had not been accustomed to
think about the past or what might come. It was enough to recognize the
harmonious interplay of his muscles and the daily stability of a body
which until now, and that briefly, had shown no sign of revolt. What
insurrection there was he meant to quell, and meantime to forget its
possibility, as a chief may, for the time, ignore rebellion. MacLeod was
plagued neither by unsatisfied desires nor by remorse. In his
philosophy, to live meant to feed upon the earth as it appeared to the
eye and to the other senses. He believed, without argument, that all the
hungers in him were good lusty henchmen demanding food. Now, in spite of
certain grim warnings he had had of late, he was filled with the old
buoyant feeling that his body was a well-to-do republic with his own
impartial self at the head of it. Justice should be done to all its
members that they might live in harmony. If discomforting forces
assailed the republic, they must be crushed. Some of these he might have
recognized as regrets, the sort of spectre that was ready to visit
Napoleon on a night af