"Athalie! I am a scoundrel if I have—"
"Oh, Clive!" she laughed, mocking the solemn measure of her own words; "adorable boy of impulse and romance, never to outgrow its magic armour, destined always to be ruled by dreams through the sweetest and most generous of hearts, you need not fear for me. I am already awake—at least I am sufficiently aroused to understand you—and something, too, of my own self which I have never hitherto understood."
For a second, lightly, she rested her warm, fresh cheek against his. When it was burning she disengaged her fingers from his and leaned aside against the rain-swept window.
"You see?" she said calmly but with heightened colour.... "I am very human after all.... But it is still my mind that rules, not my emotions."
She turned to him in her old sweetly humorous and mocking manner:
"That is all the romance of which I am capable, Clive—if there be any real romance in a very clear mind. For it is my intellect that must lead me to salvation or to destruction. If I am to come crashing down at your feet, I shall have already planned the fall. If I am to be destroyed, it will not be by any accident of romantic emotion, of unconsidered impulse, or sudden blindness of passion; it will be because
my intelligence coolly courted destruction, and accepted every chance, every hazard."
So spoke Athalie, smiling, in the full confidence and pride of her superb youth, certain of the mind's autocracy over matter, lightly defying within herself the latent tempest, of which she as yet divined no more than the first exquisitely disturbing breeze;—deriding, too, the as yet unloosened bolts of the old gods themselves,—the white lightning of desire.
"Come," she said, half mockingly, half seriously, passing her arm through Clive's;—"we are quite safe together in this safe and sane old world—unless I choose—otherwise."
She turned and touched her lips lightly to his hair: