Still Electra turned to her that look of rapt allegiance. She heard
apparently, yet the words made no impression on her fixed resolve. Now
she spoke, and rather sweetly. All the tones of her voice, all her
looks, had a reminiscent value, as if they were echoes from her lost
relation with him.

"He told me where to write," she said, as if she were satisfied with
that. "I shall go there."

"I know, the address for his letters. But he was never there. Now that
he is gone, the place will be for other uses. Everything connected with
the Brotherhood keeps fluctuating, changing. There would be no safety
otherwise."

Electra was looking at her in that removed, patient way that made
another woman of her. It was almost like a mother who has cares to think
of and can spare no time from them for alien presences.

"I must go," she said again. "He would wish it."

Rose now had her moment of delay. Her mind went back over that weary
road, to the past the present had so illumined for her. It tired her to
think the trouble ever attendant on her father's life was to go on,
ripple after ripple, now that he had sunken into the mystery of things.
Once over the horror of his death, there had been a throb of
thankfulness that at least an end had been made to his great power of
bringing pain. And now here was another life to be thrown into the void
after him, another woman to love a dream. She awoke from that momentary
musing, to hear Electra saying,--

"You will excuse me, if I go on working? I sail so soon, and I must
leave everything in order."

"Electra," said Rose. Then she called her name again, as if appealing to
the softest of her moods. "How can I tell you! Electra, you mustn't love
my father."

Again that swift smile came to Electra's face. The face itself was all a
burning truth. The old crude precision in her seemed suddenly to have
flowered into this warm candor that spoke and liked to hear itself
disclosing, regardless of its auditor.

"You cannot"--she looked at Rose with happy inspiration, as if she had
been the first to make the saying--"you can't kill love with reason."

Again Rose deliberated. When she spoke it was with an air of sad
decisiveness.

"Electra," she said wistfully, "did he ask you to marry him?"

"I never thought of it," said Electra at once, in the simplest
unreserve. "It would have seemed too small, to limit it and bound it."

"Yes. That is what he would have said, too small. You were a qu