“‘Yet,’ do you say, Antony?  Why, sincerity is the most fascinating thing in the world.”

And as they listened, Antony’s heart had stolen back to Silencieux, and once more in fancy he pressed his lips to hers in the dusk:  “It is with such an eternal passion that I love you, Silencieux.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  Of course, the writer is aware that while “Silencieux” is feminine, her name is masculine.  In such fanciful names, however, such license has always been considered allowable.]

CHAPTER II

THE COMING OF SILENCIEUX

The manner in which Antony had found and come to love Silencieux was a strange illustration of that law by which one love grows out of another—­that law by which men love living women because of the dead, and dead women because of the living.

One day as chance had sent him, picking his way among the orange boxes, the moving farms, and the wig-makers of Covent Garden, he had come upon a sculptor’s shop, oddly crowded in among Cockney carters and decaying vegetables.  Faces of Greece and Rome gazed at him suddenly from a broad window, and for a few moments he forsook the motley beauty of modern London for the ordered loveliness of antiquity.

Through white corridors of faces he passed, with the cold breath of classic art upon his cheek, and in the company of the dead who live for ever he was conscious of a contagion of immortality.

Soon in an alcove of faces he grew conscious of a presence.  Some one was smiling near him.  He turned, and, almost with a start, found that—­as he then thought—­it was no living thing, but just a plaster cast among the others, that was thus shining, like a star among the dead.  A face not ancient, not modern; but a face of yesterday, to-day, and for ever.

Instantly he knew he had seen the face before.  Where?

Why, of course, it was the face of Beatrice, feature for feature.  How strange!—­and, loving Beatrice, he bought it, because of his great love for her!  Who was the artist, what the time and circumstance, that had anticipated in this strange fashion the only face he had ever really loved on earth?

He sought information of the shopkeeper, who told him a strange little story of an unknown model and an unknown artist, and two tragic fates.

When Antony had brought Silencieux home to Beatrice, she had at first taken that delight in her which every created thing takes in a perfect, or even an imperfect, reflection of itself.  To have been anticipated in a manner so unusual gave back in romantic suggestiveness what at first sight it seemed to steal from one’s personal originality.  Only at first sight—­for, if like Beatrice, you were the possessor of a face so uncommon in type that your lover might, with little fear of disproof, declare, at all events in England,