ofane!"--She checked herself and turned on the girl almost savagely:
"Who was the fool of a man you were looking for in the crystal?... Very
well; don't tell then. I didn't suppose you would. Only--God help him
for the fool he is--and forgive him for what he has done to you!... And
may I never enter this room again and find you with the tears freshly
scrubbed out of the most honest eyes God ever gave a woman!... Good
night, Miss Greensleeve!"

"Good night," said Athalie.

After she had closed the door and locked it she turned back into the
empty room, moving uncertainly as though scarcely knowing what she was
about. And then, suddenly, the terror of utter desolation seized her,
and for the first time she realised what Clive had been to her, _and
what he had not been_--understood for the first time in her life the
complex miracle called love, its synthesis, its every element, every
molecule, every atom, and flung herself across the bed, half
strangled, sobbing out her passion and her grief.

Dawn found her lying there; but the ravage of that night had stripped
her of much that she had been, and never again would be. And what had
been taken from her was slowly being replaced by what she had never
yet been. Night stripped her; the red dawn clothed her.

She sat up, dry-eyed, unbound her hair, flung from her the crumpled
negligee. Presently the first golden-pink ray of the rising sun fell
across her snowy body, and she flung out her lovely arms to it as
though to draw it into her empty heart.

Hafiz, blinking his jewelled eyes, watched her lazily from his
pillow.

CHAPTER XVI

As she came, pensively, from her morning bath into the sunny front
room Athalie noticed the corner of an envelope projecting from beneath
her door.

For one heavenly moment the old delight surprised her at sight of
Clive's handwriting,--for one moment only, before an overwhelming
reaction scoured her heart of tenderness and joy; and the terrible
resurgence of pain and grief wrung a low cry from her: "Why couldn't
he let me alone!" And she crumpled the letter fiercely in her clenched
hand.

Minute after minute she stood there, her white hand tightening as
though to strangle the speech written there on those crushed
sheets--perhaps to throttle and silence the faint, persistent cry of
her own heart pleading a hearing for the man who had written to her at
last.

And after a while her nerveless hand relaxed; she looked down at the
cr