There seemed no further way to check expenditure. Athalie had dismissed their servant as soon as she had lost her position at Wahlbaum and Grossman's. Table expenses were reduced to Spartan limits, much to the disgust of them all. No clothes were bought, no luxuries, no trifles. They did their own marketing, their own cooking, their own housework and laundry. And had it not been that the apartment entailed no outlay for light, heat, and rent, they would have been sorely perplexed that spring and summer in New York.
Athalie permitted herself only one luxury, Hafiz. And one necessity; stamps and letter paper for foreign correspondence.
The latter was costing her less and less recently. Clive wrote seldom now. And always very sensitive where he was concerned, she permitted herself the happiness of writing only after he had taken the initiative, and a reply from her was due him.
No, matters were not going very well with Athalie. Also she was frequently physically tired. Perhaps it was the lassitude consequent on the heat. But at times she had an odd idea that she lacked courage; and sometimes when lonely, she tried to reason with herself, tried to teach her heart bravery—particularly during the long interims which elapsed between Clive's letters.
As for her attitude toward him—whether or not she was in love with him—she was too busy thinking about him to bother her head about attitudes or degrees of affection. All the girl knew—when she permitted herself to think of herself—was that she missed him dreadfully. Otherwise her concern was chiefly for him,
for his happiness and well-being. Also she was concerned regarding the promise she had made him—and to which he usually referred in his letters,—the promise to try to learn more about this faculty of hers for clear vision, and, if possible, to employ it for his sake and in his unhappy service.
This often preoccupied her, troubled her. She did not know how to go about it; she hesitated to seek those who advertised their alleged occult powers for sale,—trance-mediums, mind-readers, palmists—all the heterogeneous riffraff lurking always in metropolitan purlieus, and always with a sly weather-eye on the police.
As usual in her career since the time she could first remember, she continued to "see clearly" where others saw and heard nothing.
Faint voices in the dusk, a whisper in darkness; perhaps in her bedroom the subtle intuition of another presence. And sometimes a touch on her arm, a breath on her cheek, delicate, exquisite—sometimes the haunting sweetness of some distant harmony, half heard, half divined. And now and then a form, usually unknown, almost always smiling and friendly, visible for a few moments—the space of a fire-fly's incandescence—then fading—entering her orbit out of nothing and, going into nothing, out of it.
Of these episodes she had never entertained any fear. Sometimes they interested her, sometimes even slightly amused her. But they had never saddened her, not even when they had been the flash-lit harbingers of death. For only a sense of calmness and serenity