And the doctor laughed, as, curiously enough, people always do at jests about bacilli.

But when he looked at Wonder, he took a more serious view of bacilli.

“You must have your well looked to at once,” he said.  “Your little girl is very ill.  She must be kept very quiet, and on no account excited.”

Beatrice and Antony took it in turns to watch by Wonder’s bed that night, and once while Beatrice was watching, Antony found time to steal up the wood with his prayer to Silencieux.

Never had she looked more mask-like, more lifeless.

“Silencieux,” he cried, “I wickedly brought you my little child.  O give her back to me again!  I cannot bear it.  I cannot give her to you, Silencieux.  Take me, if you will.  I will gladly die for you.  But spare her.  O give her back to me, Silencieux!”

But the image was impassive and made no sign.

“Silencieux,” he implored, “speak, for I know you hear me.  Are you a devil, Silencieux; a devil I have worshipped all this time?  God help me!  Have you no pity,—­what is her little flower-life to you?  Why should you snatch it out of the sun—­”

But Silencieux made no sign.

Then Antony grew angry in his remorse:  “I hate you, Silencieux.  Never will I look on your face again.  You are an evil dream that has stolen from me the truth of life.  I have broken a true heart that loved me, that would have died for me—­for your sake; just to watch your loveless beauty, to hear the cold music of your voice.  You are like the moon that turns 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