ministrations that the dying child seemed to welcome most.  For the most part she lay in a semi-conscious state, heeding nothing, and only moaning now and again, a sad little moan, like an injured bird.  She seemed to say she was so little a thing to suffer so.  Once, however, when Antony had just placed some fresh ice around her head, she opened her eyes and said, “Dear little Daddy,” and the light on Antony’s face—­poor victim of perverse instincts that too often drew his really fine nature awry—­was sanctifying to see.

As terrible was the look of torture that came over his face, one night near the end, when Wonder in a sudden nightmare of delirium had seized his hand and cried:—­

“O Daddy, the white lady!  See her there at the end of the bed.  She is smiling, Daddy—­” Then lower, “You will not make me kiss her any more, will you, Daddy?”—­

Beatrice had gone to snatch an hour or two’s sleep, so she never heard this, and it was no mere cowardly consolation for Antony to think afterwards that no one but he and his little child had known of that fatal afternoon in the wood.  The dead understand all,—­yes, even the dead we have murdered.  But the living can never be told a secret such as that which Antony and his little daughter, whose soul was really grown up, though she spoke still in baby language, shared immortally between them.

When Beatrice returned to the room Wonder was sleeping peacefully again, but at the chill hour when watchers blow out the night-lights, and a dreary greyness comes like a fog through the curtains, Antony and Beatrice fell into each other’s arms in anguish, for Wonder was dead.

CHAPTER XIV

A SONG OF THE LITTLE DEAD

They carried little Wonder to a green churchyard, a place of kind old trees and tender country bells.  There were few birds to welcome her in the grim November morning, but the grasses stole close and whispered that very soon the thrush and the nightingale would be coming, that the violets were already on their way, and that when May was there she should lie all day in a bed of perfume.

For very dear to Nature’s heart are the Little Dead.  The great dead lie imprisoned in escutcheoned vaults, but for the little dead Nature spreads out soft small graves, all snowdrops and dewdrops, where day-long they can feel the earth rocking them as in a cradle, and at night hear the hushed singing of the stars.

Yes, Earth loves nothing so much as her little graves.  There the tiny bodies, like unexhausted censers, pour out all the stored sweetness they had no time to use above the ground, turning the earth they lie in to precious spices.  There the roots of the old yew trees feel about tenderly for the little unguided hands, and sometimes at nightfall the rain bends over them weeping like an inconsolable mother.

It is on the little graves that the sun first rises at morn, and it is there at evening that the moon lays softly her first silver flowers.