Rose MacLeod Part 34

"Notify them!" repeated Madam Fulton, in a spasm of fearful admiration.

"Are you going to tell all those women?"

Electra included her in that absent glance. Now that there were things to arrange, dates to cancel, topics to consider, she was on her own ground. She spoke with dignity:--

"I shall most certainly tell n.o.body. A thing like that had better die as soon as possible. I cannot"--she turned upon her grandmother, a look of pa.s.sionate interrogation on her face--"I cannot understand you."

Madam Fulton answered humbly, yet with some eagerness, as if Electra might readily be excused from so stiff a task,

"You never would, Electra, not if you lived a hundred years."

Electra was the accuser now, age and kins.h.i.+p quite forgotten.

"Why did you do a thing like that?"

"For fun," said the old lady faintly.

"For fun!" The tree of sin grew and flowered as she thought upon it.

"You offered to buy this house with that money, unclean money from the sales of that fraudulent book!"

Madam Fulton turned to Billy Stark with a childlike gesture of real surprise.

"Is it unclean money, Billy?" she asked. "Do you call it that?"

"We mustn't go too far," Billy temporized, with a warning look at Electra.

She was on the way to the door. There she paused.

"I do not fully understand it yet," she was saying. "It is monstrous. I dare say I never shall understand it." Then they heard her rustling up the stairs.

Madam Fulton and her old friend looked at each other. When a door closed overhead, Billy's face relaxed and Madam Fulton put a hand over her lips.

"Billy," said she weakly, "am I so bad?"

"You're a dear, Florrie. Don't you worry."

"But, Billy, is she right?"

"Oh, yes, my dear, she's right."

"I'm a shocking person, then!"

"Yes, you're truly shocking. But you're a dear, Florrie, you're a dear."

XV

And now it was night again and Rose hurried away to the tryst. She made no doubt that she should find him there.

"Playmate!" she called.

"Here," answered the voice. "There's your chair. There's your throne."

She plunged into the thick of the confidence intended for him.

"He has come."

"I know it. Peter told me."

"It's all as bad as I thought. Playmate, I'm afraid I shall have to go away."

"Can't you stand up to it?"

"I don't know. It's pretty bad."

"I guess it will have to come to your telling me about it."

"Yes. You see, the worst of it is, he wants to make me love somebody I can't love."

"Peter?"

"No, no, not Peter. Not nice, like Peter."

"Could you love Peter?"

"Why should you ask me that? Peter belongs to Electra."

"Not so very much. Could you love him if he asked you to?"

"Oh, that's not fair, playmate!"

"Yes, it is, when the night's as dark as this and it's only you and me.

Could you love Peter?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"I want to know everything about you. Could you love Peter?"

For some reason, she felt constrained to use one of her small obstinacies.

"I couldn't love any man when another woman stood between us."

"That's a good girl. Did you love your husband?"

"My husband!" She choked upon the word. "Tom Fulton! Did you know him?"