Athalie

There was a slight fragrance of tobacco in the room mingling with the

fresh, spring-like scent of lilacs--great pale clusters of them

decorated mantel and table, and the desk where Athalie sat writing to

Captain Dane in the semi-dusk of a May evening.

Here and there dim figures loomed in the big square room; the graceful

shape of a young girl at the piano detached itself from the gloom; a

man or two dawdled by the window, vaguely silhouetted against the

lilac-tinted sky.

Athalie wrote on: "I had not supposed you had landed until Cecil Reeve

told me this evening. If you are not too tired to come, please do so.

Do you realise that you have been away over a year? Do you realise

that I am now twenty-four years old, and that I am growing older every

minute? You had better hasten, then, because very soon I shall be too

old to believe your magic fairy tales of field and flood and all your

wonder lore of travel in those distant golden lands I dream of.

"Who was your white companion? Cecil tells me that you said you had

one. Bring him with you this evening; you'll need corroboration, I

fear. And mostly I desire to know if you are well, and next I wish to

hear whether you did really find the lost city of Yhdunez."

A maid came to take the note to Dane's hotel, the Great Eastern, and

Cecil Reeve looked up and laid aside his cigarette.

"Come on, Athalie," he said, "tell Peg to turn on one of those

Peruvian dances."

Peggy Brooks at the piano struck a soft sensuous chord or two, but

Francis Hargrave would not have it, and he pulled out the proper

phonographic record and cranked the machine while Cecil rolled up the

Beluch rugs.

The somewhat muffled air that exuded from the machine was the lovely

Miraflores, gay, lively, languorous, sad by turns--and much danced at

the moment in New York.

A new spring moon looked into the room from the west where like

elegant and graceful phantoms the dancers moved, swayed, glided, swung

back again with sinuous grace into the suavely delicate courtship of

the dance.

The slender feet and swaying figure of Athalie seemed presently to

bewitch the other couple, for they drew aside and stood together

watching that exquisite incarnation of youth itself, gliding, bending,

floating in the lilac-scented, lilac-tinted dusk under the young moon.

The machine ran down in the course of time, and Hargrave went over to

re-wind it, but Peggy Brooks waved him aside and seated herself at the

piano, saying she had enough of Hargrave.