lower than a woman?--or anything higher?"

CHAPTER XXVI

Athalie was having a wonderful summer. House and garden continued to
enchant her. She brought down Hafiz, who, being a city cat, instantly
fled indoors with every symptom of astonishment and terror the first
time Athalie placed him on the lawn.

But within a week the dainty Angora had undergone a change of heart.
Boldly, now he marched into the garden all by himself; fearlessly he
pounced upon such dangerous game as crickets and grasshoppers and the
little night moths which drifted among the flowers at twilight,--the
favourite prowling hour of Hafiz, the Beautiful.

Also, early in July, Athalie had acquired a fat bay horse and a double
buckboard; and, in the seventh heaven now, she jogged about the
country through leafy lanes and thistle-bordered by-roads long
familiar to her childhood, sometimes with basket, trowel, and garden
gloves, intent on the digging and transplanting of ferns, sometimes
with field-glasses and books, on ornithological information bent. More
often she started out with only a bag of feed for Henry the horse and
some luncheon for herself, to picnic all alone in a familiar woodland,
haunted by childish memories, and lie there listening to the bees and
to the midsummer wind in softly modulated conversation with the little
tree-top leaves.

She had brought her maid from the city; Mrs. Connor continued to rule
laundry and kitchen. Connor himself decorated the landscape with his
straw hat and overalls, weeding, spraying, rolling, driving the
lawn-mower, raking bed and path, cutting and training vines, clipping
hedges,--a sober, bucolic, agreeable figure to the youthful chatelaine
of the house of Greensleeve.

Clive had come once more from town to say that he was sailing for
England the following day; that he would be away a month all told, and
that he would return by the middle of August.

They had spent the morning driving together in her buckboard--the
happiest morning perhaps in their lives.

It promised to be a perfect day; and she was so carefree, so
contented, so certain of the world's kindness, so shyly tender with
him, so engagingly humorous at his expense, that the prospect of a
month's separation ceased for the time to appal him.

Concerning his interview with his wife she had asked him nothing; nor
even why he was going abroad. Whether she guessed the truth; whether
she had come to understand the situation through ot