--"

Antony looked at Beatrice; half as one looks at a child, and half as one
might look at an angel.

"Beatrice," he said tenderly, "you believe in God."

"All women believe in God," answered Beatrice.

"Yes," said Antony musingly, and with no thought of irony, "it is that
which makes you women."

CHAPTER XVII

ANTONY ALONE ON THE HILLS

But although Beatrice might forgive Antony, from himself came no
forgiveness. He hid his remorse from her, sparing the mother-wound in
her heart--but always when he was walking alone he kept saying to
himself: "I have lost our little Wonder. I killed our little Wonder."

One day he climbed up the highest hill within reach, and there leaned
into the enormous silence, that he might cry it aloud for God to hear--

God!--poor little Beatrice, what God was there to hear! To look at
Beatrice one might indeed believe in God--and yet was it not Beatrice
who had made God in her own image? Was not God created of all pure
overflows of the human soul, the kind light of human eyes that not all
the suffering of the world can exhaust, the idealism of the human spirit
that not all the infamies of natural law can dismay?

Nevertheless, Antony confessed himself to God upon the hills, not indeed
as one seeking pardon, but punishment.

Yet Heaven's benign untroubled blue carried no cloud upon its face,
because one breaking human heart had thus breathed into it its unholy
secret. Around that whole enormous circle such cries and such
confessions were being poured like noxious vapours, from a thousand
cities; but that incorruptible ether remained unsullied as on the first
morning, the black smoke of it all lost in the optimism of God.

On some days he would live over again the scene with Wonder in the wood
with unbearable vividness.

"Why, those are only words, silly Daddy!"--How many times a day did he
not hear that quaint little voice making, with a child's profundity,
that tremendous criticism upon literature.

He had silenced her with the music of words, as he had silenced his own
heart and soul with the same music, but they were still only words none
the less. Ah! if she were only here to-day, he would bring her something
more beautiful than words--or toadstools.

He shuddered as he thought of the loathsome form his decaying fancy had
taken, that morning by the Three Black Ponds. He had filled the small
outstretched hands with Nature's filth and poison. She had asked for
flowe