That may have been an illusion, but it was during these days that he did actually hear her speak for the first time.  He had been writing till past midnight, with her smile just above him, and when he had turned out the lamp and was moving to the door through the vague flickering light of the fire, he distinctly heard a voice very luxurious and tender say “Antony,” just behind him.  It was hardly more than a whisper, but its sweetness thrilled his blood, and half in joy and fear he turned to her again.  But she was only smiling inscrutably as before, and she spoke no more for that night.

CHAPTER VI

THE THREE BLACK PONDS

At the bottom of the valley, approached by sunken honeysuckle lanes that seemed winding into the centre of the earth, lay three black ponds, almost hidden in a cul-de-sac of woodland.  Though long since appropriated by nature, made her own by moss and rooted oaks, they were so set one below the other, with green causeways between each, that an ancient art, long since become nature, had evidently designed and dug them, years, perhaps centuries, ago.  So long dead were the old pond-makers that great trees grew now upon the causeways, and vast jungles of rush and water grasses choked the trickling overflows from one pond to the other.  Once, it was said, when the earth of those parts had been rich in iron, these ponds had driven great hammers,—­but long before the memory of the oldest cottager they had rested from their labours, and lived only the life of beauty and silence.  Where iron had once been was now the wild rose, and the grim wounds of the earth had been healed by the kisses of five hundred springs.

About these ponds stole many a secret path, veined with clumsy roots, shadowed with the thick bush of many a clustering parasite, and echoing sometimes beneath from the hollowed shelter of coot or water-rat.  Lilies floated in circles about the ponds, like the crowns of sunken queens, and sometimes a bird broke the silence with a frightened cry.

It was here that Beatrice and Wonder would often take their morning walk,—­Wonder, though but a little girl of four, having grown more and more of a companion to her mother, since Antony’s love for Silencieux.

A morning in August the two were walking hand in hand.  Wonder was one of those little girls that seem to know all the meanings of life, while yet struggling with the alphabet of its unimportant words.

The soul of such a child is, of all things, the most mysterious.  There was that in her face, as she clung on to her mother’s hand, which seemed to say:  “O mother, I understand it all, and far more; if I might only talk to you in the language of heaven,—­but my words are like my little legs, frail and uncertain of their footing, and, while I think all your strange grown-up thoughts, I can only talk of toys and dolls.  Mother, father’s blood as well as yours is in my veins, and so I understand you both.  Poor little mother!  Poor little father!”