rs, he had brought her toadstools. Oh, the shame, the crime, the
anguish!

But worst of all was to hear himself saying in the silence of his soul,
over and over again without any power to still it, as one is forced
sometimes to hear the beating of one's heart: "Silencieux, I bring you
my little child."

There were times he heard this so plainly when he was with Beatrice that
he had to leave her and walk for hours alone. Only unseen among the
hills dare he give vent to the mad despair with which that memory tore
him.

Yes, for words--"only words"--he had sacrificed that wonderful living
thing, a child. For words he had missed that magical intercourse, the
intercourse with the mind of a child. How often had she come to him for
a story, and he had been dull and preoccupied--with words; how often
asked him to take her a walk up the lane, but he had been too busy--with
words!

O God, if only she might come and ask again. Now when she was so far
away his fancy teemed with stories. Every roadside flower had its
fairy-tale which cried, "Tell me to little Wonder"--and once he tried
to make believe to himself that Wonder was holding his hand, and looking
up into his face with her big grave eyes, as he told some child's
nonsense to the eternal hills. He broke off--half in anger with himself.
Was he changing one illusion for another?

"Fool, no one hears you," and he threw himself face down in the grass
and sobbed.

But a gentle hand was laid upon his shoulder and Beatrice's voice
said,--

"I heard you, Antony--and loved you for it."

So Antony had found the heart of a father when no longer he had a child.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE SECOND TALK ON THE HILLS

"But to think," said Antony presently, in answer to Beatrice's soothing
hand, "to think that I might have lived with a child--and I chose
instead to live with words. In all the mysterious ways of man, is there
anything quite so mysterious as that? Poor dream-led fool, poor lover of
coloured shadows!

"And yet, how proud I was of the madness! How I loved to say that words
were more beautiful than the things for which they stood, and that the
names of the world's beautiful women, Sappho, Fiametta, Guinivere, were
more beautiful than Sappho, Fiametta, Guinivere themselves; that the
names of the stars were lovelier than any star--who has ever found the
Pleiades so beautiful as their name, or any king so great as the sound
of Orion?--and what, anywhere in the Unive