"Oh," she said. "Yes, I know. I'm engaged to Billy." "Grandmother--" Electra blushed a little, painfully--"You can't mean--grandmother, are you going to marry him?" Madam Fulton laid her head back upon the small silk pillow of her chair. She never owned to it, but sometimes the dull hour after luncheon brought with it a drowsiness she was ceasing to combat. She smiled at Electra, who seemed very far away from her through the veil of that approaching slumber and through the years that separated them. "We shan't marry at once, Electra," she said, dropping off while the girl looked at her. "Not at once. I expect to have a good many little affairs before I settle down." XI On the way back to the house, Peter kept looking solicitously at Rose, breaking now and then into quick regrets. "What have I done?" he asked her, in his impetuous stammer. "Shouldn't I have written to your father? Rose, what have I done?" She seemed not to hear him. Her face had a strained expression, the old look he remembered from the days of Tom's illness and her not quite natural grief. Then she had never given way to the irrepressible warmth of sorrow, like a loving wife. She had seemed to harden herself, and that he accounted for by his knowledge of Tom's hideous past. The woman had known him, Peter reflected, from illuminating intercourse, and his death meant chiefly the turning of a blotted page. But now! over her bloom of youth was the same shadowing veil. She was not so much a woman moved by strong emotion as made desperate through hidden causes. Still he besought her to forgive him, finally to look at him. Then she wakened. "It's all right, Peter," she said absently. "It had to be." But still he saw no reason for her blight and pain. It was not merely incredible, it was impossible that any one should shrink because Markham MacLeod was coming. At the door she did look at him. He was shocked at the drooping sadness of her face. Yet she was smiling. "Don't bother, Peter," she said. "You've done nothing wrong, nothing whatever."