Yet her sheer good spirits carried him with her, heart and mind, that
morning. And when it was time for him to go she said good-bye to him
with a smile as tenderly gay and as happy and confident as though he
were to return on the morrow. And went back to her magic house of
dreams and her fairy garden, knowing that, except for him, their
rainbow magic must vanish and the tinted spell fade, and the soft
enchantment dissolve forever leaving at her feet only a sunlit ruin
amid the stillness of desolation.
But the magic held. Every day she wrote him. Wireless messages came to
her from him for a while; ceased; then re-commenced, followed
presently by cablegrams and finally by letters.
So the magic held through the long sunny summer days. And Athalie
worked in her garden and strayed far afield, both driving and afoot.
And she studied and practised piano, and made curtains, and purchased
furniture.
Also she wrote letters to her sisters, long since wedded to husbands,
babies, and homes in the West. Her brother Jack, she learned, had
joined the Navy at Puget Sound, and had now become a petty officer
aboard the new battle-cruiser Bon Homme Richard in Asiatic waters.
She wrote to him, also, and sent him a money order, gaily suggesting
that he use it to educate himself as a good sailor should, and that he
save his pay for a future wife and baby--the latter, as she wrote,
"being doubtless the most desirable attainment this side of Heaven."
In her bedroom were photographs of Catharine's children and of the
little boy which Doris had brought into the world; and sometimes, in
the hot midsummer afternoons, she would lie on her pillow and look at
these photographs until the little faces faded to a glimmer as slumber
dulled her eyes.
Captain Dane came once or twice to spend the day with her; and it was
pleasant, afterward, for her to remember this big, blond, sunburnt man
as part of all that she most cared for. Together they drove and walked
and idled through house and garden: and when he went away, to sail the
following day for those eternal forests which conceal the hearthstone
of the Western World, he knew from her own lips about her love for
Clive. He was the only person she ever told.
A few of her friends she asked to the house for quiet week-ends; the
impression their visits made upon her was pleasant but colourless.
And it seemed singular, as she thought it over, how subordinate, how
unaccented had always been all these people who came into her life,
lingered, and faded out of it, leaving only the impressions of
backgrounds and accessories against which only one figure stood clear
and distinct--her lover's.