ter the campaign in Egypt. They were, he thought,
inseparable from great power and the necessities attending its
administration. But they were enemies of the republic, and he killed
them. So his voice was always hearty, his eye clear, and his cheek that
healthy red.

Peter he found in fits of laughter, and Rose mimicking certain
characters known to them in Paris. It was encouraging, he judged, to
find Rose out of her dumps. But she was only keeping Peter by her until
MacLeod should come and help detain him. Peter had said something in the
early evening about going down to find Osmond, who had of late, he
averred, been off at night on his deep wood prowls. "No," Rose wanted to
say,--and there would have been a choking triumph in her throat,--"he
has been in the playhouse waiting for me." And because she could not go
that night to the wide liberty of the fields, she would not have Peter
wandering off that way and hunting up her playmate, breaking spells and
spoiling wordless messages. MacLeod had not seen her so gay, not since
the days in Paris before she met Tom Fulton, when she had been one of a
changing wave of artist life, made up of students delirious with
possibilities and all bent toward the top notch of reputation. He joined
her and Peter now in precisely their own mood, his laugh and voice
reinforcing theirs. Rose warmed more and more. Not all her dreary
memories could keep her from delighting in him. He carried her along on
that high wave of splendid spirits, oblivious for the moment to all his
faults. Thus, she paused to remember again, it had been in her too-wise
childhood when, seeing her mother wan with tears, she had yet put her
little hand in his and gone off with him for an hour's pleasuring,
though he was the fount of grief as well as gayety. He compelled her,
the sheer physical health of him.

Peter rose finally, to give them a moment alone, and wandered off down
the garden, singing a light song and then whistling it farther and
farther into the dark. Something constricted the girl's throat. She
remembered, in the silence fallen between them, that she was alone with
the enemy of her peace, and felt again that old passionate regret that
he had not allowed her to keep the beauty of her belief in him. He had
swept away something she had thought to be indestructible. That, more
than any deed, was the wrong he had done--he had set his foot upon the
flower of hope. But MacLeod, his forehead bared to the nigh