men mad, a hollow shell of silver drawing all your light from the
sun of life, a silver shadow of the golden sun."

But prayer and reproach were alike in vain. Silencieux remained
unheeding, and Antony returned to watch by Beatrice's side, with a heart
that had now no hope, and a soul weighed down with the sense of
irrevocable sin. There lay the little life he had murdered, delivered up
to the Moloch of Art. No sorrow, no agonies, were now of any avail for
ever. Little Wonder would surely die, and all the old lost opportunities
of loving her could never return. He had loved the shadow. This was a
part of the price.

Day after day the cruel fever consumed Wonder as fire consumes a flower.
Her tiny face seemed too small for the visitation of such suffering as
burned and hammered behind the high white brow, and yellowed and drew
tight the skin upon the cheeks. She had so recently known the strange
pain of being born. Already, for so little of life, she was to endure
the pain of death.

Day after day, hour after hour, Antony hung over her bed, with a
devotion and an unconsciousness of fatigue that made Beatrice look at
him with astonishment, and sometimes even for a moment forget Wonder in
the joy with which she saw him transfigured by simple human love. Now,
when it was too late, he had become a father indeed. And it brought some
ease to his fiercely tortured heart to notice that it was his
ministrations that the dying child seemed to welcome most. For the most
part she lay in a semi-conscious state, heeding nothing, and only
moaning now and again, a sad little moan, like an injured bird. She
seemed to say she was so little a thing to suffer so. Once, however,
when Antony had just placed some fresh ice around her head, she opened
her eyes and said, "Dear little Daddy," and the light on Antony's
face--poor victim of perverse instincts that too often drew his really
fine nature awry--was sanctifying to see.

As terrible was the look of torture that came over his face, one night
near the end, when Wonder in a sudden nightmare of delirium had seized
his hand and cried:--

"O Daddy, the white lady! See her there at the end of the bed. She is
smiling, Daddy--" Then lower, "You will not make me kiss her any more,
will you, Daddy?"--

Beatrice had gone to snatch an hour or two's sleep, so she never heard
this, and it was no mere cowardly consolation for Antony to think
afterwards that no one but he and his little child had