"I did not know you could see such things."
"I am not sure that I can. It is very difficult for me, sometimes, to distinguish between vividly imaginative visualisation and—other things."
Walking back through the soft afternoon light the girl tried to tell him all that she knew about herself and her clairvoyance—strove to explain, to make him understand, and, perhaps, to understand herself.
But after a while silence intervened between them; and when they spoke again they spoke of other things. For the isolation of souls is a solitude inviolable; there can be no intimacy there, only the longing for it—the craving, endless, unsatisfied.
CHAPTER XXIII
OVER the garden a waning moon silvered the water in the pool and picked out from banked masses of bloom a tall lily here and there.
All the blossom-spangled vines were misty with the hovering wings of night-moths. Through alternate bands of moonlight and dusk the jet from the pool split into a thin shower of palely flashing jewels, sometimes raining back on the water, sometimes drifting with the wind across the grass. And through the dim enchantment moved Athalie, leaning on Clive's arm, like some slim sorceress in a secret maze, silent, absent-eyed, brooding magic.