"Absolutely.... But it must be so."

"Why?" she asked, troubled.

"For one thing, I shall have to work harder now."

"Why?"

"Don't you know we can not marry on what I have?"

"Oh! Is _that_ the reason?" She laughed, sprang lightly to her feet, stood looking down at him. He got up, slowly.

"I bring you," she said, "six hundred dollars a year. And a _little_ more. Which sweeps away that obstacle. Doesn't it?"

"I could not ask you to live on that----"

"I can live on what you live on! I should wish to. It would make me utterly and supremely happy."

Her flushed, young face confronted his as she took a short, eager step toward him.

"I am not making love to you," she said, "--at least, I don't think I am. All I desire is to help--to give you myself--my youth, energy, ambition, intelligence--and what I have--which is of no use to me unless it is useful to you. Won't you take these things from me?"

"Do you give me your heart, too, Cecil?"

She smiled faintly, knowing now that she had already given it. She did not answer, but her under lip trembled, and she caught it between her teeth as he took her hands and kissed them in silence.

VI

"Miami is not very far, is it?" she asked, as she sprang aboard the _Orange Puppy_.

"Not very, dear."

"We could get a license immediately, couldn't we?"

"I think so."

"And then it will not take us very long to get married, will it?"

"Not very."

"What a wonderful night!" she murmured, looking up at the stars. She turned toward the sh.o.r.e. "What a wonderful place for a honeymoon!...

And we can continue business, too, and watch our caterpillars all day long! Oh, it is all too wonderful, wonderful!" She kissed her hand to the unseen camp. "We will be back to-morrow!" she called softly. Then a sudden thought struck her. "You never can get the _Orange Puppy_ through that narrow lead, can you?"

"Oh, there is an easier way out," he said, taking the tiller as the sail filled.

Her head dropped back against his knees. Now and then her lips moved, murmuring in sheerest happiness the thoughts that drifted through her enchanted mind.

"I wonder when it began," she whispered, "--at the ball-game--or on Fifth Avenue--or when I saw you here? It seems to me as if I always had been in love with you."

Outside in the ocean, the breeze stiffened and the perfume was tinged with salt.

Lying back against his knees, her eyes fixed dreamily on the stars, she murmured:

"Stirrups _will_ be surprised."

"What are you talking about down there all by yourself?" he whispered, bending over her.

She looked up into his eyes. Suddenly her own filled; and she put up both arms, linking them around his neck.

And so the _Orange Puppy_ sailed away into the viewless, formless, starry mystery of all romance.

After a silence the young novelist, who had been poking the goldfish, said slowly: "That's pretty poor fiction, Athalie, but, as a matter of simple fact and inartistic truth, recording sentimental celerity, it stands unequalled."

"Straight facts make poor fiction," remarked Duane.

"It all depends on who makes the fiction out of them," I ventured.

"Not always," said Athalie. "There are facts which when straightly told are far stranger than fiction. I noticed a case of that sort in my crystal last winter." And to the youthful novelist she said: "Don't try to guess who the people were if I tell it, will you?"

"No," he promised.

"Please fix my cushions," she said to n.o.body in particular. And after the stampede was over she selected another cigarette, thoughtfully, but did not light it.

VII

"You are queer folk, you writers of fiction," she mused aloud. "No monarch ordained of G.o.d takes himself more seriously; no actor lives more absolutely in a world made out of his imagination."

She lighted her cigarette: "You often speak of your most 'important'

book,--as though any fiction ever written were important. Painters speak of their most important pictures; sculptors, composers, creative creatures of every species employ the adjective. And it is all very silly. Facts only can be characterised as important; figments of the creative imagination are as unimportant----" she blew a dainty ring of smoke toward the crystal globe--"as that! '_Tout ce qu'ont fait les hommes, les hommes peuvent le detruire. Il n'y a de caracteres ineffacables que ceux qu' imprime la nature._' There has never been but one important author."

I said smilingly: "To quote the gentleman you think important enough to quote, Athalie, '_Tout est bien sortant des mains de l'Auteur des choses: tout degenere entre les mains de l'homme_.'"

Said the novelist simply: "Imagination alone makes facts important.

'_Cette superbe puissance, ennemie de la raison!_'"

"O Athalie," whispered Duane, "night-blooming, exquisite blossom of the arid munic.i.p.al desert, recount for us these facts which you possess and which, in your delightful opinion, are stranger than fiction, and more important."

And Athalie, choosing another sweetmeat, looked at us until it had dissolved in her fragrant mouth. Then she spoke very gravely, while her dark eyes laughed at us: