ngs good.

In modern art--with the exception of a few painters--she found little
to attract her; but the magnificence of the great Venetians, the
sombre splendour of the great Spaniards, the nobility of the great
English and Dutch masters held her with a spell forever new. And, as
for the exquisite, naively self-conscious works of Greuze, Lancret,
Fragonard, Boucher, Watteau, and Nattier, she adored them with all the
fresh and natural appetite of a capacity for visual pleasure unjaded.

He recognised Raphael with respect and pleasure when authority
reassured him it _was_ Raphael. Also he probably knew more about the
history of art than did she. Otherwise it was Athalie who led,
instinctively, toward what gallery and library held as their best.

Her favourite lingering places were amid the immortal Chinese
porcelains and the masterpieces of the Renaissance. And thither she
frequently beguiled Clive,--not that he required any persuading to
follow this young and lovely creature who ranged the full boundaries
of her environment, living to the full life as it had been allotted
her.

Wholesome with that charming and rounded slenderness of perfect health
there yet seemed no limit to her capacity for the enjoyment of all
things for which an appetite exists--pleasures, mental or physical--it
did not seem to matter.

She adored walking; to exercise her body delighted her. Always she ate
and drank with a relish that fascinated; she was mad about the theatre
and about music:--and whatever she chanced to be doing she did with
all the vigour, intelligence, and pleasure of which she was capable,
throwing into it her entire heart and soul.

It led to temporary misunderstandings--particularly with the men she
met--even in the small circle of friends whom she received and with
whom she went about. Arthur Ensart entirely mistook her until fiercely
set right one evening when alone with him; James Allys also listened
to a curt but righteously impassioned discourse which he never forgot.
Hargrave's gentlemanly and suavely villainous intentions, when finally
comprehended, became radically modified under her coolly scornful
rebuke. Welter, fat and sentimental, never was more than tiresomely
saccharine; Ferris and Lyndhurst betrayed symptoms of being
misunderstood, but it was a toss-up as to the degree of seriousness in
their intentions.

[Illustration: "Once more, the old happy companionship began."]

The intentions of men are seldom