"Your wife," she went on thoughtfully, "will learn much when she dies. There is a compulsory university course which awaits us all,--a school with many forms and many grades and many, many pupils. But we must die before we can be admitted.... I have never before spoken to you as I have spoken to-day.... Perhaps I never shall again.... The world is a blind place--lovely but blind. "As for the woman who wears your name but wears no ring of yours she has been moving through my crystal for many days;--I would have made no effort to intrude on her had she not persisted in the crystal, haunted it,--I cannot tell you why--only that she is always there, now.... And last night I knew that she was in New York, and why she had come here.... Shall you see her to-day?" "Where is she?" "At the Regina." "Are you sure?" The girl calmly closed her eyes for a moment. After a brief silence she opened them: "She is still there.... She will awake in a little while and ring for her breakfast. The two men you drove out of the garden last night are waiting to see her. There is another man there. I think he is your wife's attorney.... Have you decided to see her?" "Yes." "You won't let what she may say about me trouble you, will you?" "What will she say?" he asked with the naive confidence of absolute and childish faith. Athalie laughed: "Darling! I don't know. I'm not a witch or a sorceress. Did you think I was?--just because I can see a little more clearly than you?" "I didn't know what your limit might be," he answered, smiling slightly, in spite of his deep anxiety. "Then let me inform you at once. My eyes are better than many people's. Also my _other_ self can see. And with so clear a vision, and with intelligence--and with a very true love and reverence for God--somehow I seem to visualise what clairvoyance, logic, and reason combine to depict for me. "I used to be afraid that a picturesque and vivid imagination coupled with a certain amount of clairvoyance might seduce me to trickery and charlatanism. "But if it be charlatanism for a paleontologist to construct a fish out of a single fossil scale, then there may be something of that ability in me. For truly, Clive, I am often at a loss where to draw the line between what I see and what I reason out--between my clairvoyance and my deductions. And if I made mistakes I certainly should be deeply alarmed. But--I don't," she added, laughing. "And so, in regard to those two men last night, and in regard to what _she_ and they may be about, I feel not the least concern. And you must not. Promise me, dear." But he rose, anxious and depressed, and stood silent for a few moments, her hands clasped tightly in his. For he could see no way out of it, now. His wife, once merely indifferent, was beginning to evince malice. And what further form that malice might take he could not imagine; for hitherto, she had not desired divorce, and had not concerned herself with him or his behaviour.