them--a wide
white tent under which she could creep out of the sunlight and hide.

Always, too, her earliest memories were crowded with children, hosts
of them in a kaleidoscopic whirl around her, and their voices seemed
ever in her ears.

By the age of four she had gradually understood that this vaguely
pictured host of children numbered only three, and that they were her
brother and two sisters--very much grown up and desirable to play
with. But at seven she began to be surprised that Doris and Catharine
were no older and no bigger than they were, although Jack's twelve
years still awed her.

It was about this time that the child began to be aware of a
difference between herself and the other children. For a year or two
it did not trouble her, nor even confuse her. She seemed to be aware
of it, that was all.

When it first dawned on her that her mother was aware of it too, she
could never quite remember. Once, very early in her career, her mother
who had been sewing under the peach tree, dropped her work and looked
down at her very steadily where she sat digging holes in the dirt.

And Athalie had a vague idea in after life that this was the
beginning; because there had been a little boy sitting beside her all
the while she was digging; and, somehow, she was aware that her mother
could not see him.

She was not able to recollect whether her mother had spoken to her, or
even whether she herself had conversed with the little boy. He never
came again; of that she was positive.

When it was that her brother and sisters began to suspect her of being
different she could not remember.

In the beginning she had not understood their half-incredulous
curiosity concerning her; and, ardently communicative by nature, she
was frank with them, confident and undisturbed, until their child-like
and importunate aggressiveness, and the brutal multiplicity of their
questions drove her to reticence and shyness.

For what seemed to amaze them or excite them to unbelief or to jeers
seemed to her ordinary, unremarkable, and not worthy of any particular
notice--not even of her own.

That she sometimes saw things "around corners," as Jack put it, had
seemed natural enough to her. That, now and then, she seemed to
perceive things which nobody else noticed never disturbed her even
when she became aware that other people were unable to see them. To
her it was as though her own eyesight were normal, and astigmatism the
rule among ot