able expenses were reduced to Spartan
limits, much to the disgust of them all. No clothes were bought, no
luxuries, no trifles. They did their own marketing, their own cooking,
their own housework and laundry. And had it not been that the
apartment entailed no outlay for light, heat, and rent, they would
have been sorely perplexed that spring and summer in New York.

Athalie permitted herself only one luxury, Hafiz. And one necessity;
stamps and letter paper for foreign correspondence.

The latter was costing her less and less recently. Clive wrote seldom
now. And always very sensitive where he was concerned, she permitted
herself the happiness of writing only after he had taken the
initiative, and a reply from her was due him.

No, matters were not going very well with Athalie. Also she was
frequently physically tired. Perhaps it was the lassitude consequent
on the heat. But at times she had an odd idea that she lacked courage;
and sometimes when lonely, she tried to reason with herself, tried to
teach her heart bravery--particularly during the long interims which
elapsed between Clive's letters.

As for her attitude toward him--whether or not she was in love with
him--she was too busy thinking about him to bother her head about
attitudes or degrees of affection. All the girl knew--when she
permitted herself to think of herself--was that she missed him
dreadfully. Otherwise her concern was chiefly for him, for his
happiness and well-being. Also she was concerned regarding the promise
she had made him--and to which he usually referred in his
letters,--the promise to try to learn more about this faculty of hers
for clear vision, and, if possible, to employ it for his sake and in
his unhappy service.

This often preoccupied her, troubled her. She did not know how to go
about it; she hesitated to seek those who advertised their alleged
occult powers for sale,--trance-mediums, mind-readers, palmists--all
the heterogeneous riffraff lurking always in metropolitan purlieus,
and always with a sly weather-eye on the police.

As usual in her career since the time she could first remember, she
continued to "see clearly" where others saw and heard nothing.

Faint voices in the dusk, a whisper in darkness; perhaps in her bedroom
the subtle intuition of another presence. And sometimes a touch on her
arm, a breath on her cheek, delicate, exquisite--sometimes the haunting
sweetness of some distant harmony, half heard, half divi