"Ah, my dear fellow!" MacLeod forgot the simplicity of the moment and put on his platform voice. "Nothing is ours." Osmond regarded him with a slow smile coming,--his perfect clothes, his white hand, his air of luxurious equipment. "Isn't it?" he asked ironically. "Well, it looks mighty like it. But I haven't any data. I know what goes on inside my own fences. I don't know much more. What do you want of Peter?" "To-day?" "Any time. All the time. He has joined your league. What do you intend to do with him?" MacLeod put his hands in his pockets and stretched his legs a little farther. He regarded the outer circle of hills, and then brought his gaze back over the pleasant rolling land between. Finally he looked at Osmond and smiled at him in what seemed a community of feeling. "My dear fellow," he said, "I am not considering the individual." "I am," said Osmond, with an offensive bluntness. "I am considering Peter. What are you going to do with him?" "Your brother joined us of his own free will." "Yes. But now you've got him, what do you want to do with him?" "Isn't it of any use for me to tell you that when a man joins us, he has passed beyond personal recognition or privilege? Outside our circle, he is an individual; he counts. Inside--well, it is difficult to say what he is. We want him then to consider himself one of the drops that make a sea. The sea washes down things--even the cliffs. The drop of water is of no importance alone. With a million, million others, it moves. It crushes." Osmond sat looking straight at him with eyes that burned. His hands, hanging at his side, were clenched. He recognized the might of the man, the crude physical power of him like an emanation, and he felt the despairing helplessness of trying to move a potency like that. Cliffs might be corroded by the sea; but a human force that respects no other cannot be easily invaded. He spoke without his own will, and heard himself speaking:-- "You haven't any soul!" MacLeod was regarding him with as direct a gaze. "What do you mean by that?" he asked, with a moderate interest. "Do you mean I haven't any mercy, any kindness? Is that what you mean?" It was not what he meant. It was the indwelling spirit such as he saw in grannie, the mobile thing in Peter that, changing, blossoming in errant will here and there as the sun of life bade it, seemed in one form or another to proclaim itself undying. He shook his head. "No," he said, "that's not what I mean." A smile ran over MacLeod's face and moved it most delightfully. "Well," said he, "if we're going to take inventories--have you a soul?" Osmond shook his head again. "I don't know," he answered. "Well, then, what's the use of slanging me? If you're in the same box yourself--Come, who has one? has anybody?" Osmond thought then of Rose, and of the fire of the spirit playing over her, that brightness he could neither classify nor define. Yet he must believe in it. "Yes," he said. "I have seen it."