r anywhere to lay your
head in that tumble down old house?" he demanded, secretly enchanted
with her rash enthusiasm.

"I propose to camp. I can buy milk, crackers, and sardines at Spring
Pond village; also sufficient bathroom and bed linen. That is all I
require to be perfectly comfortable."

There was no rumble on the Stinger, only a baggage rack and boot. Here
he secured, covered, and strapped Athalie's impedimenta; the maid
slipped on her travelling coat; she sprang lightly into the seat; and
Clive went around and climbed in beside her, taking the wheel.

The journey downtown and across the Queensboro Bridge was the usual
uncomfortable and exasperating progress familiar to all who pilot cars
to Long Island. Brooklyn was negotiated prayerfully; they swung into
the great turnpike, through the ugliest suburbs this humiliated world
ever endured, on through the shabby, filthy, sordid environment of the
gigantic Burrough, past ignoble villages, desolate wastes, networks
of railway tracks where grade crossings menaced them, and on along the
purlieus of suburban deserts until the flat green Long Island country
spread away on either side dotted with woods and greenhouses and
quaint farm-houses and old-time spires.

"It is pretty when you get here," he said, "but it's like climbing
over a mile of garbage to get out of one's front door. No European
city would endure being isolated by such a desert of squalor and
abominable desolation."

But Athalie merely smiled. She had been far too excited to notice the
familiar ugliness and filth of the dirty city's soiled and ragged
outskirts.

And now the car sped on amid the flat, endless acres of cultivated
land, and already her dainty nose was sniffing familiar but
half-forgotten odours--the faintest hint of ocean, the sun-warmed
scent of freshly cut salt hay; perfumes from woodlands in heavy
foliage, and the more homely smell from barn-yard and compost-heap;
from the sunny, dusty village streets through which they rolled; from
village lanes heavy with honeysuckle.

"I seem to be speeding back toward my childhood," she said. "Every
breath of this air, every breeze, every odour is making it more real
to me.... I wonder whatever became of my ragged red hood and cloak. I
can't remember."

"I'd like to have them," he said. "I'd fold them and lay them away
for--"

He checked himself, sobered, suddenly and painfully aware that the
magic of the moment had opened for him an unreal