e
mark. The real audiences are out of London. A couple of years'
touring would do you a world of good. You shall make your name
first.... There aren't any actors and actresses now simply because
they won't tour. They want money in London--money in New York--the
pity of it is that they get it.'

Clara scrambled up to the highest point of the crag and stood with the
gentle wind playing through her thick hair, caressing her parted lips,
her white neck, liquefying her light frock about her limbs.

'Oh, my God!' cried Sir Henry, gazing at her enraptured. 'Ariel!'

As she stood there she was caught up in the wonder of the night, became
one with it, a beam in the moonlight, a sigh in the wind, a star
winking, a little tiny cloud floating over the tops of the mountains.
So lightly poised was she that it seemed miraculous that she did not
take to flight, almost against nature that she could stand so still.
Her lips parted, and she sang as she used to sing when she was a
child,--

Come unto these yellow sands
And then take hands.'

A little young voice she had, sweet and low, a boyish voice, nothing of
woman in it at all.

She leaned forward and gazed over the edge of the crag, and Sir Henry,
who was so deeply moved that all his ordinary mental processes were
dislocated, thought with a horrid alarm that she was going to throw
herself down. Such perfection might rightly end in tragedy, and he
thought with anguish of Mann and Verschoyle, thought that they had
besmirched and dishonoured this loveliness, thought that this sudden
exaltation and abstraction must come from the anguish that was betrayed
in her eyes so often and so frequently.

'Take care! Take care!' called Sir Henry.

She leaped down into the heather by his side, and he said,--

'It seems a crime to take you back into the house. What have you to do
with whether or no we are asked to the next garden-party in Downing
Street? You are Ariel and can put a girdle round the earth.... I am
almost afraid of you. Can't we run away and become strolling players?
You may think I am to be envied but my life has been a very unhappy
one.... I want to help you....'

It was obvious to Clara that he did not know what he was saying, and
indeed he was light-hearted and moonstruck, lifted outside his ordinary
range of experience. He babbled on,--

'If I could feel that I had done the smallest thing to help you, I
should be prouder of it than of any other