[Illustration: "She said in a low voice, still watching intently:
'Blue sky, green trees, a snowy shore, and little azure
wavelets....'"]

CHAPTER XVII

It was about five months later that Cecil Reeve wrote his long reply
to a dozen letters from Clive Bailey which heretofore had remained
unanswered and neglected:

"--For Heaven's sake, do you think I've nothing to do except
to write you letters? I _never_ write letters; and here's the
exception to prove it. And if I were not at the Geyser Club,
and if I had not dined incautiously, I would not write this!

"But first permit me the indiscretion of asking you why an
engaged man is so charitably interested in the welfare of a
young girl who is not engaged to him? And if he is
interested, why doesn't he write to her himself and find out
how she is? Or has she turned you down?

"But you need not incriminate and degrade yourself by
answering this question.

"Seriously, Clive, you'd better get all thoughts of Athalie
Greensleeve out of your head as long as you intend to get
married. I knew, of course, that you'd been hard hit.
Everybody was gossiping last winter. But this is rather raw,
isn't it?--asking me to find out how Athalie is and what she
is doing; and to write you in detail? Well anyway I'll tell
you once for all what I hear and know about her and her
family--her family first, as I happen to have had dealings
with them. And hereafter you can do your own philanthropic
news gathering.

"Doris and Catharine were in a rotten show I backed. And when
I couldn't afford to back it any longer Doris was ungrateful
enough to marry a man who cultivated dates, figs, and pecan
nuts out in lower California, and Catharine has just written
me a most impertinent letter saying that real men grew only
west of the Mississippi, and that she is about to marry one
of them who knows more in half a minute than anybody could
ever learn during a lifetime in New York, meaning me and
Hargrave. I guess she meant me; and I guess it's so--about
Hargrave. Except for myself, we certainly are a bunch of
boobs in this out-of-date old town.

"Now about Athalie,--she dropped out of sight after you went
abroad. Nobody seemed to know where she was or what she was
doing. Nobody ever saw her at restaurants or theatres except
during the first few weeks after your departure. And then s