associating it with you!... Do you do any trance work?"
"No.... I have never cultivated—anything of that sort."
"I know. The really gifted don't cultivate the power as a rule. Only one now and then, and here and there. The others are pure frauds—almost every one of them. But—" she looked searchingly at the girl,—"you're no fraud! Why you're full of it!—full—saturated—alive with—with vitality—psychical and physical!—You're a glorious thing—half spiritual, half human—a superb combination of vitality, sacred and profane!"—She checked herself and turned on the girl almost savagely: "Who was the fool of a man you were looking for in the crystal?... Very well; don't tell then. I didn't suppose you would. Only—God help him for the fool he is—and forgive him for what he has done to you!... And may I never enter this room again and find you with the tears freshly scrubbed out of the most honest eyes God ever gave a woman!... Good night, Miss Greensleeve!"
"Good night," said Athalie.
After she had closed the door and locked it she turned back into the empty room, moving uncertainly as though scarcely knowing what she was about. And then, suddenly, the terror of utter desolation seized her, and for the first time she realised what Clive had been to her, and what he had not been—understood for the first time in her life the complex miracle called love, its synthesis, its every element, every molecule,
every atom, and flung herself across the bed, half strangled, sobbing out her passion and her grief.
Dawn found her lying there; but the ravage of that night had stripped her of much that she had been, and never again would be. And what had been taken from her was slowly being replaced by what she had never yet been. Night stripped her; the red dawn clothed her.
She sat up, dry-eyed, unbound her hair, flung from her the crumpled negligée. Presently the first golden-pink ray of the rising sun fell across her snowy body, and she flung out her lovely arms to it as though to draw it into her empty heart.
Hafiz, blinking his jewelled eyes, watched her lazily from his pillow.