was glowing. She had seen that look so
many times on other faces, that wistful longing for the unnamed
beautiful. It was what Markham MacLeod was always calling out in faces.
They might be young, they might be the faces of those who had suffered
long experience, but always it was those who were hungry, either with
the hunger of youth or the delay of hope, the cruelty of time. He seemed
to be the great necromancer, the great promiser. Could such promises
come to naught?

"To leave here?" she suggested. "To leave--" she hesitated.

"I shouldn't leave Electra," said Peter simply. "When I met you, I was
going to ask her to go with me."

She stopped and held out her hand to him.

"Go," she said. "Go to her and ask her. I wish you luck, Peter--dear
Peter!"

He did not look altogether a happy lover, as he stood holding her hand.
He gazed at her, she thought, sadly, as if he dreamed of things that
could not be. What was it in youth that made everything into twilight,
even with the drum and fife calling to wars and victories? She was
impatient with it, with deceiving life itself that promised and then
lied. She took her hand away.

"Good-by, Peter," she said, sadly now in her turn, because it occurred
to her that after Peter should have seen Electra, he would never again
be her own good comrade. He would know. She left him standing there
looking after her, and then, when he found she would not loiter, he went
on his way. But Peter did not toss his stick up now. He walked slowly,
and thought of what he meant to do.

They seemed to be walking with him, one on each side, Rose and Electra.
It was chiefly the thought of Electra, as it had moulded him from year
to year while he had been absent from her; but it was the delicate
presence of the other woman, so wonderful by nature and so equipped with
all the arts of life that the pleasure of her was almost pain. They
seemed to keep a hand upon him, one through his fealty to her and the
other by compelling and many-sided beauty.

XX

Electra, in her excitement, found herself unable to stay upstairs at her
accustomed tasks. She had to know what grandmother thought of this
ill-bred woman. But speeding down, she saw grandmother in the garden
path with Billy Stark. There they walked intimately arm-in-arm, and
grandmother talked. There was something eager in the pose of her head.
Evidently what she had heard quite pleased her, if only because it was
some new thing. And the