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 dewdrop glittering low down upon the earth.

It was the god in him that knew itself for one brief space, a moment’s awakening in the sleep of fact.

Could a god so great, so awakened, be again the slave of one earthly face?

Yes, the greater the god, the greater the slave; and so it was that, falling plumb down from that skyey exaltation, human again with the weakness that follows divine moments, Antony returned from the morning star to Silencieux.

Her face was bathed in the delicate early sunlight and looked very pure and gentle, and he kissed her.

Surely those terrible words had been an illusion of the dark hours.  Silencieux had never said them.  He kissed her again.

“I love you, Silencieux,” he said.  And then she spoke.

“If you love me, Antony,” she said, “if you love me—­”

“O what, Silencieux?” he cried, his heart growing cold once more.

“Come nearer, Antony.  Put your ear to my lips—­Antony, if you love me—­the human sacrifice.”

“O God,” he cried, “here in the sunlight—­It is true—­”

And, a man with the doom of his nature heavy upon him, he once more went out into the wood.

CHAPTER XI

WONDER IN THE WOOD

A few days after this, little Wonder, playing about the garden, had slipped away from her nurse, and, pleased in her little soul at her cleverness, had found her way up to her father’s chalet.  Antony was sitting at his desk, writing, with his door open.

“Daddy,” suddenly came a little voice from the bottom of the staircase, “Daddy, where are you?”

Antony rose and went to the door.

“Come in, little Wonder.  Well, it is a clever girl to come all the way up the wood by herself.”

“Yes, Daddy,” said the self-possessed little girl, as she toddled into the chalet and looked round wonderingly at the books and pictures.  Then presently: