nd yet so
fascinating too."

"'Yet,' do you say, Antony? Why, sincerity is the most fascinating thing
in the world."

And as they listened, Antony's heart had stolen back to Silencieux, and
once more in fancy he pressed his lips to hers in the dusk: "It is with
such an eternal passion that I love you, Silencieux."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Of course, the writer is aware that while "Silencieux" is
feminine, her name is masculine. In such fanciful names, however, such
license has always been considered allowable.]

CHAPTER II

THE COMING OF SILENCIEUX

The manner in which Antony had found and come to love Silencieux was a
strange illustration of that law by which one love grows out of
another--that law by which men love living women because of the dead,
and dead women because of the living.

One day as chance had sent him, picking his way among the orange boxes,
the moving farms, and the wig-makers of Covent Garden, he had come upon
a sculptor's shop, oddly crowded in among Cockney carters and decaying
vegetables. Faces of Greece and Rome gazed at him suddenly from a broad
window, and for a few moments he forsook the motley beauty of modern
London for the ordered loveliness of antiquity.

Through white corridors of faces he passed, with the cold breath of
classic art upon his cheek, and in the company of the dead who live for
ever he was conscious of a contagion of immortality.

Soon in an alcove of faces he grew conscious of a presence. Some one was
smiling near him. He turned, and, almost with a start, found that--as he
then thought--it was no living thing, but just a plaster cast among the
others, that was thus shining, like a star among the dead. A face not
ancient, not modern; but a face of yesterday, to-day, and for ever.

Instantly he knew he had seen the face before. Where?

Why, of course, it was the face of Beatrice, feature for feature. How
strange!--and, loving Beatrice, he bought it, because of his great love
for her! Who was the artist, what the time and circumstance, that had
anticipated in this strange fashion the only face he had ever really
loved on earth?

He sought information of the shopkeeper, who told him a strange little
story of an unknown model and an unknown artist, and two tragic fates.

When Antony had brought Silencieux home to Beatrice, she had at first
taken that delight in her which every created thing takes in a perfect,
or even an imperfect, reflection of itself