dipped down the green path, among the
shadows and the toadstools and the silence.

"Silencieux," he said over to himself--"I love you, Silencieux."

Far down the wood came and went through the trees the black and white
gable of a little chalet to which he was dreaming his way.

Suddenly a small bronze object caught his eye moving across the mossy
path. It was a beautiful beetle, very slim and graceful in shape, with
singularly long and fine antennae. Antony had loved these things since
he was a child,--dragonflies with their lamp-like eyes of luminous horn,
moths with pall-like wings that filled the world with silence as you
looked at them, sleepy as death--loved them with the passion of a
Japanese artist who delights to carve them on quaint nuggets of metal.
Perhaps it was that they were so like words--words to which he had given
all the love and worship of his life. Surely he had loved Silencieux[1]
more since he had found for her that beautiful name.

He held the beetle in his hand a long while, loving it. Then he said to
himself, with a smile in which was the delight of a success: "A
vase-shaped beetle with deer's horns."

The phrase delighted him. He set the insect down on the path, tenderly.
He had done with it. He had carved it in seven words. The little model
might now touch its delicate way among the ferns at peace.

"A vase-shaped beetle with deer's horns," he repeated as he walked on,
and then the gathering gloom of the wood suggested an addition: "And
some day I shall find in the wood that moth of which I have dreamed
since childhood--the dark moth with the face of death between his
wings."

The chalet stood on a little clearing, in a little circle of pines. From
it the ground sloped down towards the valley, and at some distance
beneath smoke curled from a house lost amid clouds of foliage, the
abounding green life of this damp and brooding hollow. A great window
looking down the woodside filled one side of the chalet, and the others
were dark with books, an occasional picture or figured jar lighting up
the shadow. A small fire flickered beneath a quaintly devised mantel,
though it was summer--for the mists crept up the hill at night and
chilled the souls of the books. A great old bureau, with a wonderful
belly of mahogany, filled a corner of the room, breathing antique
mystery and refinement. At one end of it, on a small vacant space of
wall, hung a cast, apparently the death-mask of a woman, by whic