I said I wanted?"

"One which would grow up with proper fear and respect for Hafiz," he
said, smilingly, perplexed by the rapid sequence of her moods.

"A collie?"

"If you like."

"I wonder," she murmured, "whether they are safe for children--" She
looked up laughing: "_Isn't_ it odd! I simply cannot seem to free my
mind of children whenever I think about that house."

As they moved along the path toward the new home he said: "What was it
you saw in the woods?"

"Children."

"Were they--real?"

"No."

"Had they died?"

"They have not yet been born," she said in a low voice.

"I did not know you could see such things."

"I am not sure that I can. It is very difficult for me, sometimes, to
distinguish between vividly imaginative visualisation and--other
things."

Walking back through the soft afternoon light the girl tried to tell
him all that she knew about herself and her clairvoyance--strove to
explain, to make him understand, and, perhaps, to understand herself.

But after a while silence intervened between them; and when they spoke
again they spoke of other things. For the isolation of souls is a
solitude inviolable; there can be no intimacy there, only the longing
for it--the craving, endless, unsatisfied.

CHAPTER XXIII

Over the garden a waning moon silvered the water in the pool and
picked out from banked masses of bloom a tall lily here and there.

All the blossom-spangled vines were misty with the hovering wings of
night-moths. Through alternate bands of moonlight and dusk the jet
from the pool split into a thin shower of palely flashing jewels,
sometimes raining back on the water, sometimes drifting with the wind
across the grass. And through the dim enchantment moved Athalie,
leaning on Clive's arm, like some slim sorceress in a secret maze,
silent, absent-eyed, brooding magic.

Already into her garden had come the little fantastic creatures of the
night as though drawn thither by a spell to do her bidding. Like a fat
sprite a speckled toad hopped and hobbled and scrambled from their
path; a tiny snake, green as the grass blades that it stirred, slipped
from a pool of moonlight into a lake of shadow. Somewhere a small owl,
tremulously melodious, called and called: and from the salt meadows,
distantly, the elfin whistle of plover answered.

Like some lost wanderer from the moon itself a great moth with
nile-green wings fell flopping on the grass at the girl's feet. And
Cliv