e me up. I understand it
so much better, now. I know how it was--with your father dead and your
beautiful mother, broken, desolate, confiding to your keeping all her
hope and pride and future happiness,--all the traditions of the
family, and its dignity and honour!

"In the light of a clearer knowledge, do you suppose I blame you now?
Do you suppose I blame you for anything?--for your long and
broken-hearted and bitter silence?--for the quick resurgence of your
affection for me--for your love--Oh, Clive!--for your passion?

"Do you suppose I think less of you because you love me--care for me
in the many and inexplicable ways that a man cares for a
woman?--because you want me as a man wants the woman he loves, as his
wife if it may be so, as his _own_, anyhow?"

She let her eyes rest on him in a new and fearless comprehension,
tender, curious, sad by turns.

"It is the romance of passion in you that has been fighting to awaken
the Sleeping Princess of a legend," she said with a slight smile; "it
is the same illogical, impulsive romance that draws back just as her
closed lids tremble, fearing to awaken her to the sorrows and
temptations of a world which, after all, God made for us to wake in."

"Athalie! I am a scoundrel if I have--"

"Oh, Clive!" she laughed, mocking the solemn measure of her own words;
"adorable boy of impulse and romance, never to outgrow its magic
armour, destined always to be ruled by dreams through the sweetest and
most generous of hearts, you need not fear for me. I am already
awake--at least I am sufficiently aroused to understand you--and
something, too, of my own self which I have never hitherto
understood."

For a second, lightly, she rested her warm, fresh cheek against his.
When it was burning she disengaged her fingers from his and leaned
aside against the rain-swept window.

"You see?" she said calmly but with heightened colour.... "I am very
human after all.... But it is still my mind that rules, not my
emotions."

She turned to him in her old sweetly humorous and mocking manner:

"That is all the romance of which I am capable, Clive--if there be any
real romance in a very clear mind. For it is my intellect that must
lead me to salvation or to destruction. If I am to come crashing down
at your feet, I shall have already planned the fall. If I am to be
destroyed, it will not be by any accident of romantic emotion, of
unconsidered impulse, or sudden blindness of passion; it will