Athalie

As for her attitude toward him--whether or not she was in love with

him--she was too busy thinking about him to bother her head about

attitudes or degrees of affection. All the girl knew--when she

permitted herself to think of herself--was that she missed him

dreadfully. Otherwise her concern was chiefly for him, for his

happiness and well-being. Also she was concerned regarding the promise

she had made him--and to which he usually referred in his

letters,--the promise to try to learn more about this faculty of hers

for clear vision, and, if possible, to employ it for his sake and in

his unhappy service.

This often preoccupied her, troubled her. She did not know how to go

about it; she hesitated to seek those who advertised their alleged

occult powers for sale,--trance-mediums, mind-readers, palmists--all

the heterogeneous riffraff lurking always in metropolitan purlieus,

and always with a sly weather-eye on the police.

As usual in her career since the time she could first remember, she

continued to "see clearly" where others saw and heard nothing.

Faint voices in the dusk, a whisper in darkness; perhaps in her bedroom

the subtle intuition of another presence. And sometimes a touch on her

arm, a breath on her cheek, delicate, exquisite--sometimes the haunting

sweetness of some distant harmony, half heard, half divined. And now and

then a form, usually unknown, almost always smiling and friendly, visible

for a few moments--the space of a fire-fly's incandescence--then

fading--entering her orbit out of nothing and, going into nothing,

out of it.

Of these episodes she had never entertained any fear. Sometimes they

interested her, sometimes even slightly amused her. But they had never

saddened her, not even when they had been the flash-lit harbingers of

death. For only a sense of calmness and serenity accompanied them:

and to her they had always been part of the world and of life, nothing

to wonder at, nothing to fear, and certainly nothing to intrude

on--merely incidents not concerning her, not remarkable, but natural

and requiring no explanation.

But she herself did not know and could not explain why, even as a

child, she had been always reticent regarding these occurrences,--why

she had always been disinclined to discuss them. Unless it were a

natural embarrassment and a hesitation to discuss strangers, as though

comment were a species of indelicacy,--even of unwarranted intrusion.

One night while reading--she had been scanning a newspaper column of

advertisements hoping to find a chance for herself or Catharine--glancing

up she again saw Clive's father seated near her. At the same moment he

lifted his head, which had been resting on one hand, and looked across

the hearthstone at her, smiling faintly.