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 Universe, is lovely enough to bear Arcturus for its name?—­Ah! you know how I used to talk—­poor fool, poor lover of coloured shadows!”

“Yes, dear,” said Beatrice soothingly, “but that is passed now, and you must not dwell too persistently in the sorrow of it, or in your grief for little Wonder.  That too is to dwell with shadows, and to dwell with shadows either of grief or joy is dangerous for the soul.”

“I know.  But fear not, Beatrice.  Perhaps there was the danger of my passing from one cloudland to another—­for I never knew how I loved our Wonder till now, and I longed, if only by imagination, to follow her where she has gone, and share with her the life together we have lost here—­”

“But that can never be,” said Beatrice; “you must accept it, Antony.  We shall only meet her again by doing that.  The sooner we can say from our hearts ‘She is lost here,’ the nearer is she to being found in another world.  Yes, Antony dear, even Wonder’s little shadow must be left behind, if we are to mount together the hills of life.”

“My wonderful Beatrice!  Yes, the hills of life.  No more its woods, but its hills, bathed in a vast and open sunshine.  Look around us—­how nobly simple is every line and shape!  Far below the horizon nature is elaborate, full of fancies,—­mazy watercourses, delicate dingles, fantastically gloomy ravines, misshapen woods, gibbering with diablerie; but here how simple, how great, how good she is!  There is not a shape subtler than a common bowl, and the colours are alphabetical—­and yet, by what taking of thought could she have achieved an effect so grand, at once so beautiful and so holy?”