owns. Pianos sounded through open parlour windows; there was
dancing going on somewhere in the block.

Eastward where the street intersected the glare of the dingy avenue, a
policeman stood on fixed post, the electric lights guttering on his
metal-work when he turned. Athalie had laid her cheek on her arms and
closed her eyes, from fatigue, perhaps; perhaps to force back the
tears which, nevertheless, glimmered on her lashes where they lay
close to the curved white cheeks.

Little by little the girl was taking degree after degree in her
post-graduate course, the study of which was man.

And for the first time in her life a new reaction in the laboratory of
experience had revealed to her a new element in her analysis;
bitterness.

Which is akin to resentment. And to these it is easy to ally
recklessness.

* * * * *

There came to her a moment, as she sat huddled there at the window,
when endurance suddenly flashed into a white anger; and she found
herself on her feet, pacing the room as caged things pace, with a sort
of blindly fixed purpose, seeing everything yet looking at nothing
that she passed.

But after this had lasted long enough she halted, gazing about her as
though for something that might aid her. But there was only the room
and the furniture, and Hafiz asleep on a chair; only these and the
crystal sphere on its slim bronze tripod. And suddenly she found
herself on her knees beside it, staring into its dusky transparent
depths, fixing her mind, concentrating every thought, straining every
faculty, every nerve in the one desperate and imperative desire.

But through the crystal's depths there is no aid for those who "see
clearly," no comfort, no answer. She could not find there the man she
searched for--the man for whom her soul cried out in fear, in anger,
in despair. As in a glass, darkly, only her own face she saw,
fire-edged with a light like that which burns deep in black opals.

Prone on the floor at last, her white face framed by her hands, her
eyes wide open in the dark, she finally understood that her clear
vision was of no avail where she herself was concerned; that they who
see clearly can never use that vision to help themselves.

Fiercely she resented it,--the more bitterly because for the first
time in her life she had condescended to any voluntary effort toward
clairvoyance.

Wearily she sat up on the floor and gathered her knees into her arms,
stari