Athalie was having a wonderful summer. House and garden continued to

enchant her. She brought down Hafiz, who, being a city cat, instantly

fled indoors with every symptom of astonishment and terror the first

time Athalie placed him on the lawn.

But within a week the dainty Angora had undergone a change of heart.

Boldly, now he marched into the garden all by himself; fearlessly he

pounced upon such dangerous game as crickets and grasshoppers and the

little night moths which drifted among the flowers at twilight,--the

favourite prowling hour of Hafiz, the Beautiful.

Also, early in July, Athalie had acquired a fat bay horse and a double

buckboard; and, in the seventh heaven now, she jogged about the

country through leafy lanes and thistle-bordered by-roads long

familiar to her childhood, sometimes with basket, trowel, and garden

gloves, intent on the digging and transplanting of ferns, sometimes

with field-glasses and books, on ornithological information bent. More

often she started out with only a bag of feed for Henry the horse and

some luncheon for herself, to picnic all alone in a familiar woodland,

haunted by childish memories, and lie there listening to the bees and

to the midsummer wind in softly modulated conversation with the little

tree-top leaves.

She had brought her maid from the city; Mrs. Connor continued to rule

laundry and kitchen. Connor himself decorated the landscape with his

straw hat and overalls, weeding, spraying, rolling, driving the

lawn-mower, raking bed and path, cutting and training vines, clipping

hedges,--a sober, bucolic, agreeable figure to the youthful chatelaine

of the house of Greensleeve.

Clive had come once more from town to say that he was sailing for

England the following day; that he would be away a month all told, and

that he would return by the middle of August.

They had spent the morning driving together in her buckboard--the

happiest morning perhaps in their lives.

It promised to be a perfect day; and she was so carefree, so

contented, so certain of the world's kindness, so shyly tender with

him, so engagingly humorous at his expense, that the prospect of a

month's separation ceased for the time to appal him.

Concerning his interview with his wife she had asked him nothing; nor

even why he was going abroad. Whether she guessed the truth; whether

she had come to understand the situation through other and occult

agencies, he could not surmise. But one thing was plain enough;

nothing that had happened or that threatened to happen was now

disturbing her. And her gaiety and high spirits were reassuring him

and tranquillising his mind to a degree for which, on reflection, he

could scarcely account, knowing the ultimate hopelessness of their

situation.




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