ant you to
go in and conquer--earn your fame, earn your bread. I don't want you to
depend on anybody, even on me."

Peter was wrinkling his brows. He was delightfully good-tempered, and
money meant very little to him save as a useful medium of which there
was sure to be enough. He had never regarded it as a means of moral
discipline.

"That's very awkward," he said, "because--Osmond, I want to marry."

"To marry! You said she had given you up!"

"Oh, Electra!" That issue had withdrawn into a dim past. "Osmond, I have
spoken to Rose."

"Rose!" Now again Osmond felt the blood beating in his ears. Was it the
impulse of fight, he asked himself, or another, as savage? But this time
he did not mean to be overborne. Peter was speaking simply and boyishly,
with a great sincerity.

"I see now there never was anybody but Rose, from the minute we met. I
told her yesterday."

"So you are--engaged." Osmond brought out the commonplace word with a
cold emphasis.

Peter looked at him, surprised.

"No. She's not to be had for the asking. I had to tell her. But I've got
to earn her. If you knew her as I do, you'd see that."

Osmond's brain was in a maze of longing to hear what she had said, and
with it a fierce desire to escape that knowledge. Also he was overborne
by a passionate recoil from his own suggestion of cutting off his
brother's income. At least he might have some share in their happiness.
He could work here like a gnome underground, delving for the gold to
deck their bridal. And underneath was that new pain at the heart: that
earth pang so sickening that it might well threaten to stop the heart's
beating altogether.

"There never was anything like her," said Peter, out of his new dream.
"She needs happiness, sheer happiness, after what she has been through.
That settles it about living abroad." He looked up brightly. "We must be
in Paris."

"You think she would wish it?"

"We should be near her father, near headquarters. For of course we
should be working for the Brotherhood."

Osmond turned abruptly.

"I must get to hoeing," he said.

Peter followed him. Something in the air struck him with a new timidity.

"You know," he qualified, when they were well into the field, "she
hasn't accepted me."

"No."

"I'm not the man for her, in many ways. Who is? But by the powers! I bet
I could make her happy."

He took off his hat to strike at a butterfly, not to destroy it but to
prove his good-will, and Osm