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urging him, because it seemed to her, too, a doubtful pleasure, if it must be shared. "Not to-day, then. But I shall see you again." "Before you go." Her face called upon him like a messenger beseeching news. "Many, many times," he told her smilingly. "Many times, even if they have to be within a few days. Now, good-by." She watched him down the walk, and as if he knew that, he turned, as the shrubbery was closing about him, and waved his hat to her. That seemed another bit of prescience,--to know she was to be there. Electra was very happy. She sat down again in a swoon of the reason and a mad hurry of what cried to her as the higher part of her nature, unrecognized until now, and thought of her exalted fortune. MacLeod found Rose ready to question him. She was at the gate, to have her word immediately. He noted the signs of apprehension in her face, and, taking her hand, swung it as they walked. "Has anything happened?" she asked irrepressibly. "I've been down to--what do they call it?--the plantation." "What did you talk about?" "Oh, crops!" "You don't know anything about crops!" MacLeod laughed. "Well, the other man did. I can always listen." "Have you been there all the time?" "No. I went in to see Electra." Rose stopped short in the path between the banks of flowers. It was a still day, and the summer hush of the plot--a velvet stillness where the garden held its breath--made the time momentous to her. Unconsciously she gripped her father's hand. "She has told you!" she breathed. Her eyes sought his face. MacLeod was looking at her smilingly, fondly even. She shuddered. "You are a goose, Rose," he said lightly. He released his fingers from the clasp of hers and gave her hand a little shake before he dropped it. "But I can't help it. If you will go on tipping over your saucer of cream, why, you must do it, that's all." They walked on, and at the steps she paused again, though she heard Peter's voice within. "You're terribly angry with me, aren't you?" she said, in a low tone, seeming to make it half communion with herself. "Angry, my girl! Don't say a thing like that." "You look exactly as you did the night Ivan Gorof defied you--and the next day he died." MacLeod laughed again, so humorously that Peter, coming forward from the library, his own face serious with unwelcome care, smiled involuntarily and returned to his every-day mood of belief that, on the whole,
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