foot."

He stepped down among the sheep to the grassy stage, laying aside his
hat and letting the sun sparkle on his bright hair. The odd sheepskin
coat lent a touch of grotesqueness to his beauty as he began.

"'Nay, be thou what thou wilt; but I will bury him: well for me to die
in doing that. I shall rest, a loved one with him whom I have loved,
sinless in my crime; for I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to
the living: in that world I shall abide forever.'"

Slow, full, and sweet the words came, beating like music on the girl's
heart. All the sorrow of earth seemed gathered up in the undertones,
all its hunger and thirst for life and love: in it rang the voice of a
will stronger than death and strong as love.

The sheep lifted their heads and looked on anxiously, as if for a
moment even the heart of a beast were touched by human sorrow. From
over the highest ridge of this green amphitheatre San Pietro looked
down with the air of one who had nothing more to learn of woe. Apollo
stood in the centre of the stage, taking one voice, then another: now
the angry tone of the tyrant, Creon, now the wail of the chorus, hurt
but undecided, then breaking into the unspeakable sweetness and
firmness of Antigone's tones. The sheep went back to their nibbling;
San Pietro trotted away with his jingling bells, but Daphne sat with
her face leaning on her hands, and slow tears trickling over her
fingers.

The despairing lover's cry broke in on Antigone's sorrow; Haemon,
"bitter for the baffled hope of his marriage," pleaded with his father
Creon for the life of his beloved. Into his arguments for mercy and
justice crept that cry of the music on the hills that had sounded
through lonely hours in Daphne's ears. It was the old call of passion,
pleading, imperious, irresistible, and the girl on Caesar's seat
answered to it as harp strings answer to the master's hand. The wail
of Antigone seemed to come from the depths of her own being:--

"Bear me witness, in what sort, unwept of friends, and by what laws I
pass to the rock-closed prison of my strange tomb, ah me unhappy!...
No bridal bed, no bridal song hath been mine, no joy of marriage."

The sun hung low above the encircling hills when the lover's last cry
sounded in the green theatre, drowning grief in triumph as he chose
death with his beloved before all other good. Then there was silence,
while the round, golden sun seemed resting in a red-gold haze on the