On the night when we first met him bidding good-bye to Silencieux “until the rising of the moon,” he had sat through dinner eating but little, feverishly and somewhat cruelly gay.  Though he was as yet too kind to admit it to himself, Beatrice was beginning to bore him, not merely by her sadness, which his absorption prevented his realising except in flashes, but by her very resemblance to the Image—­of which, from having been the beloved original, she was, in his eyes, becoming an indifferent materialisation.  The sweet flesh he had loved so tenderly became an offence to him, as a medium too gross for the embodiment of so beautiful a face.  Such a face as Silencieux’s demanded a more celestial porcelain.

Dinner at last finished, he made an excuse to Beatrice for leaving her alone once more at the end as he had during all the rest of the day, and hastened to keep his tryst with Silencieux.  During dinner the conscious side of his mind had been luxuriating in the romantic sound of “until the rising of the moon,”—­for he was as yet a long way from being quite simple even with Silencieux,—­and the idea of his going out with serious eagerness to meet one who, if she was as he knew a living being, was an image too, delighted his sense of fantastic make-believe.

There is in all love that element of make-believe.  Every woman who is loved is partly the creation of her lover’s fancy.  He consciously siderealises her, and with open eyes magnifies her importance to his life.  Antony but made believe and magnified uncommonly—­and his dream of vivifying white plaster was perhaps less desperate than the dreams of some, that would breathe the breath of life into the colder clay of some beloved woman, who seems spontaneously to live but is dead all the while.

Silencieux appeared to be dead, but beneath that eternal smile, as Beatrice had divined, as Antony was learning, she was only too terribly alive.  Yes!  Antony’s was the easier dream.

The moon and Antony came up the wood together from opposite ends, and when Antony entered his chalet Silencieux was already waiting for him, her head crowned with a moonbeam.  He kissed her softly and took her with him out into the ferns.

CHAPTER V

SILENCIEUX SPEAKS

So long as the moon held, Antony stole up the wood each night to meet Silencieux—­“at the rising of the moon.”  Sometimes he would lie in a hollow with her head upon his knee, and gaze for an hour at a time, entranced, into her face.  He would feign to himself that she slept, and he would hold his breath lest he should awaken her.  Sometimes he would say in a tender whisper, not loud enough for her to hear:—­

“It is cold to-night, Silencieux.  See, my cloak will keep you warm.”

Once as he did this she heaved a gentle sigh, as though thanking him.

At other times he would place her against the gable of the chalet, so that the moonlight fell upon her, and then he would plunge into the wood and walk its whole length, so that, as he wound his way back through the intervening brakes, her face would come and go, glimmering away off through the leafage, beckoning to him to return.  And once he thought he heard her call his name very softly through the wood.