her?"

"Yes."

"You won't let what she may say about me trouble you, will you?"

"What will she say?" he asked with the naive confidence of absolute
and childish faith.

Athalie laughed: "Darling! I don't know. I'm not a witch or a
sorceress. Did you think I was?--just because I can see a little more
clearly than you?"

"I didn't know what your limit might be," he answered, smiling
slightly, in spite of his deep anxiety.

"Then let me inform you at once. My eyes are better than many
people's. Also my _other_ self can see. And with so clear a vision,
and with intelligence--and with a very true love and reverence for
God--somehow I seem to visualise what clairvoyance, logic, and reason
combine to depict for me.

"I used to be afraid that a picturesque and vivid imagination coupled
with a certain amount of clairvoyance might seduce me to trickery and
charlatanism.

"But if it be charlatanism for a paleontologist to construct a fish
out of a single fossil scale, then there may be something of that
ability in me. For truly, Clive, I am often at a loss where to draw
the line between what I see and what I reason out--between my
clairvoyance and my deductions. And if I made mistakes I certainly
should be deeply alarmed. But--I don't," she added, laughing. "And so,
in regard to those two men last night, and in regard to what _she_ and
they may be about, I feel not the least concern. And you must not.
Promise me, dear."

But he rose, anxious and depressed, and stood silent for a few
moments, her hands clasped tightly in his.

For he could see no way out of it, now. His wife, once merely
indifferent, was beginning to evince malice. And what further form
that malice might take he could not imagine; for hitherto, she had not
desired divorce, and had not concerned herself with him or his
behaviour.

As for Athalie, it was now too late for him to step out of her life.
He might have been capable of the sacrifice if the pain and
unhappiness were to be borne by him alone--or even if he could bring
himself to believe or even hope that it might be merely a temporary
sorrow to Athalie.

But he could not mistake her, now; their cords of love and life were
irrevocably braided together; and to cut one was to sever both. There
could be no recovery from such a measure for either, now.

What was he to do? The woman he had married had rejected his loyalty
from the very first, suffered none of his ideas of duty to move her
from