"Isn't it strange?" she exclaimed, almost to herself.
"Strange to think what power a woman has--a woman of that stamp."
"Don't, Electra. You mustn't classify her. You can't."
She was considering it with a real curiosity.
"You don't blame her at all," she said. "You know Tom did wrong. You don't think she did."
"Electra," he said gently, "we can't go back to that. It's over and done with. Besides, it is between those two. It isn't our business."
"You could blame Tom!" She clung to that. He saw she would not release her hold.
"Electra!" He put out his hands and took her unwilling ones. Then he gazed at her sweetly and seriously; and when Peter was in gentle earnest, he did look very good. "Electra, can't you see what she is?"
His appealingness had for the instant soothed that angry devil in her. She wrenched her hands free, with the one hoarse cry instinct with mental pain,--
Peter stepped back a pace. His face paled. He could not answer. Electra felt the rush of an emotion stronger than herself. It swept her on, her poise forgotten, her rules of life snapping all about her.
"I have always known it, from the first day you spoke of her. She has bewitched you. Perhaps this is what she really came for--to separate us. Well, she has done it."
Something seemed demanded of him, and he could only answer in her own words,--
Her heat had cooled. Her soberer self had the upper hand again, and she spoke now like the gracious lady called to some dignified dismissal.
"I find," she said, "I must have intended to say this for days. We must give up--what we meant to do."
"I came to-day,"--Peter's voice sounded very honest in his endeavor to show how well he had meant,--"I came to ask you to go back to France. We would live on a little. We would serve the Brotherhood--the chief says you have joined already--" Electra bowed her head slightly, still in a designed remoteness.
"I shall go to France," she said, "later. But I shall never marry you. That is over. As you said of something else, it is over and done with."
She glanced toward the door, but he kept his place. Peter was conscious that of all the things he ought to feel, he could not summon one. It did not seem exactly the woman he had loved who was dismissing him. This was a handsome and unfriendly stranger, and in the bottom of his heart surged a sweet new feeling that was like hope and pain.