She had a great many friends among the boys; she could out-run, out-jump, out-swim any of them in the big country school. She was supple and trim, golden-haired and dark-eyed, and ready for anything that required enterprise and activity of mind or body. Her ragged skirts were still short at eleven--short enough not to impede her. And she led the chase for pleasure all over that part of Long Island, running wild with the pack from hill to tide-water until every farmer in the district knew "the Greensleeve girl." There was, of course, some deviltry among cherry trees and apple orchards--some lawlessness born of sheer exuberance and superb health--some malicious trespassing, some harrying of unpopular neighbours. But not very much, considering. Her home life was colourless, calm, comfortable, and uneventful as she regarded it. Business at the Hotel Greensleeve had fallen off and in reality the children had very little. But children at that age who live all day in the open, require little except sympathetic intelligence for their million daily questions. This the Greensleeve children found wanting except when their mother did her best to stimulate her own latent intelligence for their sakes. But it rested on the foundation of an old-fashioned and limited education. Only the polite, simpler, and more maidenly arts had been taught her in the little New Jersey school her father had kept. And her education ceased when she married Greensleeve, the ex-"professor" of penmanship, a kind, gentle, unimaginative man, unusually dull even for a teacher. And he was a failure even at that. They began married life by buying the house they were now living in; and when Greensleeve also failed as a farmer, they opened the place as a public tavern, and took in Ledlie to finance it. So it was to her mother that Athalie went for any information that her ardent and growing intellect required. And her mother, intuitively surmising the mind-hunger of youth, and its vigorous needs, did her limited best to satisfy it in her children. And that is really all the education they had; for what they got in the country school amounted to--well it amounted to what anybody ever gets in school. * * * * * Her most enduring, most vivid memories of her mother clustered around those summer days of her twelfth year, brief lamp-lit scenes between long, sunlit hours of healthy, youthful madness--quiet moments when she came in flushed and panting from the headlong chase after pleasure, tired, physically satisfied, to sit on the faded carpet at her mother's feet and clasp her hands over her mother's knees.