"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, things go well. "I didn't kill him," MacLeod was saying, as he mounted the steps. Rose shivered a little. "No," she insisted. "But he died." MacLeod was beguilingly entertaining at dinner that day, and in the afternoon he and Peter went to drive. At supper, too, he was in his best mood, and that evening Rose, worn out by the strain of his persistent dominance, escaped to her own room. There she sat and counseled her tense nerves. She was afraid. Then when she heard the closing of grannie's door, she slipped downstairs to her tryst. The night was dark, and there was a grumble of thunder from the west. In her excitement she took swift steps, as if all her senses were more keenly awake than they had been in the light, and kept the path unerringly. She had no doubt that he was there, but he called to her before she could ask. His voice vibrated to the excitement in her own heart. "Good child, to come!" She found her chair and sank into it. "I had to come." At once she felt light-hearted. There seemed to be no bounds to his protection of her. "I have told Electra." "I knew you would." "She has told Peter. They know it now,--all but grannie,--dear grannie." "She can wait. She won't flicker. She won't vary. Nothing can shake grannie's old heart." "What did he say to you to-day?" Osmond laughed. It was a low note of pleasure. "Platitudes," he rejoined. "And what did you say to him?" "Platitudes again. He said his kind, I said mine. I learned a few truths." "About his business?--that's what it is. I can say it when I'm not in the same room with him--business." "About me. I learned what other fellows know when they are boys." "Did he teach you?" "He? No. Yes. Through my hatred of him." "Ah, then you hated him! Was it because I taught you to?" "Partly. Partly because he is an insolent animal. He is kind because he is well-fed. Yet I think it was chiefly because he has ill-used you." "Yes," she owned sadly. "I betrayed him to you." But Osmond had escaped from recollection of the day into a mood half meditative, half excited fancy.