und his way back
through the intervening brakes, her face would come and go, glimmering
away off through the leafage, beckoning to him to return. And once he
thought he heard her call his name very softly through the wood.

That may have been an illusion, but it was during these days that he did
actually hear her speak for the first time. He had been writing till
past midnight, with her smile just above him, and when he had turned out
the lamp and was moving to the door through the vague flickering light
of the fire, he distinctly heard a voice very luxurious and tender say
"Antony," just behind him. It was hardly more than a whisper, but its
sweetness thrilled his blood, and half in joy and fear he turned to her
again. But she was only smiling inscrutably as before, and she spoke no
more for that night.

CHAPTER VI

THE THREE BLACK PONDS

At the bottom of the valley, approached by sunken honeysuckle lanes that
seemed winding into the centre of the earth, lay three black ponds,
almost hidden in a _cul-de-sac_ of woodland. Though long since
appropriated by nature, made her own by moss and rooted oaks, they were
so set one below the other, with green causeways between each, that an
ancient art, long since become nature, had evidently designed and dug
them, years, perhaps centuries, ago. So long dead were the old
pond-makers that great trees grew now upon the causeways, and vast
jungles of rush and water grasses choked the trickling overflows from
one pond to the other. Once, it was said, when the earth of those parts
had been rich in iron, these ponds had driven great hammers,--but long
before the memory of the oldest cottager they had rested from their
labours, and lived only the life of beauty and silence. Where iron had
once been was now the wild rose, and the grim wounds of the earth had
been healed by the kisses of five hundred springs.

About these ponds stole many a secret path, veined with clumsy roots,
shadowed with the thick bush of many a clustering parasite, and echoing
sometimes beneath from the hollowed shelter of coot or water-rat. Lilies
floated in circles about the ponds, like the crowns of sunken queens,
and sometimes a bird broke the silence with a frightened cry.

It was here that Beatrice and Wonder would often take their morning
walk,--Wonder, though but a little girl of four, having grown more and
more of a companion to her mother, since Antony's love for Silencieux.

A morning in Au