Peter he found in fits of laughter, and Rose mimicking certain characters known to them in Paris. It was encouraging, he judged, to find Rose out of her dumps. But she was only keeping Peter by her until MacLeod should come and help detain him. Peter had said something in the early evening about going down to find Osmond, who had of late, he averred, been off at night on his deep wood prowls. "No," Rose wanted to say,--and there would have been a choking triumph in her throat,--"he has been in the playhouse waiting for me." And because she could not go that night to the wide liberty of the fields, she would not have Peter wandering off that way and hunting up her playmate, breaking spells and spoiling wordless messages. MacLeod had not seen her so gay, not since the days in Paris before she met Tom Fulton, when she had been one of a changing wave of artist life, made up of students delirious with possibilities and all bent toward the top notch of reputation. He joined her and Peter now in precisely their own mood, his laugh and voice reinforcing theirs. Rose warmed more and more. Not all her dreary memories could keep her from delighting in him. He carried her along on that high wave of splendid spirits, oblivious for the moment to all his faults. Thus, she paused to remember again, it had been in her too-wise childhood when, seeing her mother wan with tears, she had yet put her little hand in his and gone off with him for an hour's pleasuring, though he was the fount of grief as well as gayety. He compelled her, the sheer physical health of him.
Peter rose finally, to give them a moment alone, and wandered off down the garden, singing a light song and then whistling it farther and farther into the dark. Something constricted the girl's throat. She remembered, in the silence fallen between them, that she was alone with the enemy of her peace, and felt again that old passionate regret that he had not allowed her to keep the beauty of her belief in him. He had swept away something she had thought to be indestructible. That, more than any deed, was the wrong he had done--he had set his foot upon the flower of hope. But MacLeod, his forehead bared to the night air, hummed to himself the song Peter was singing, and then spoke with a commonplace assurance:--