e. I saw it in
your eyes."

"Poor Beatrice!" said Antony. "It is little indeed I give her. Could you
not spare her so little, Silencieux?"

"I can spare her nothing. You must be all mine, Antony--your every
thought and hope and dream. So long as there is another woman in the
world for you except me, I cannot be yours in the depths of my being,
nor you mine. There must always be something withheld. It will never be
perfect, until--"

"Until when?"

"Until, Antony,"--and Silencieux lowered her voice to an awful
whisper,--"until you have made for me the human sacrifice."

"The human sacrifice!"

"Yes, Antony,--all my lovers have done that for me. They were not really
mine till then. Some have brought me many such offerings. Antony, when
will you bring me the human sacrifice?"

"O Silencieux!"

Antony's heart chilled with terror at Silencieux's words. It was against
this that the voices had warned him as he came up the wood. O that he
had never seen Silencieux more, never heard her poisonous voice again!

As one fleeing before the shadow of uncommitted sin that gains upon him
at each stride, Antony fled from the place, and sought the moors. The
moon was near its setting, and soon the dawn would throw open the
eastern doors of the sky. He walked on and on, waiting, praying for,
stifling for the light; and, at last, with a freshening of the air, and
faint sounds of returning consciousness from distant farms, it came.

High over a lake of ethereal silver welling up out of space, hung the
morning star, shining as though its heart would break, bright as a tear
that must slip down the face of heaven and fall amid the grass.

As Antony looked up at it, his soul escaped from its prison of dark
thought, and such an exaltation had come with the quickening light, that
it seemed as though the body, with little more than pure aspiration to
wing it, might follow the soul's flight to that crystal sphere.

In that moment, Antony knew that the love in the soul of man is mated
only with the infinite universe. In no marriage less than that shall it
find lasting fulfilment of itself. No single face, however beautiful, no
single human soul, however vast, can absorb it. Silencieux, Beatrice,
Wonder, himself, all faded away, in a trance-like sense of a stupendous
passion, an august possession. He felt that within him which rose up
gigantic from the earth, and towered into eyries of space, from whence
that morning star seemed like a