So in some hours will the most mortal maid of warmest flesh and blood become an abstraction to her lover—­sometimes shrink to the significance of one more flower, and sometimes expand to the significance of a microcosm, a firmament in mystical miniature.

Thus in like manner for Antony did Silencieux alternate between reality and dream that afternoon, though all the time he knew that, however now and again the daylight seemed to create an illusion of her remoteness, she was still his, and he of all men her chosen lover.

Suddenly as they sat there together, silent and immovable, Antony caught the peer of two bright little eyes fixed on the white face of Silencieux.  A tiny wedge-shaped head, with dashes of white across the brows, reared itself out of a crevice in the bank.  A forked tongue came and went like black lightning through its eager little lips, and a handsomely marked adder began to glide, like molten metal, along the bank to Silencieux.  The brilliant whiteness of the image had fascinated the little creature.  Antony kept very still.  Darting its head from side to side, venomously alert against the smallest sound, the adder reached Silencieux.  Then to Antony’s delight it coiled itself round the white throat, still restlessly moving its head wonderingly beneath the chin.  With a grace to which all movement from the beginning of time seemed to have led up, it clasped Silencieux’s neck and softly reared its lips to hers.  Its black tongue darted to and fro along that strange smile.

“He has kissed her!” Antony exclaimed, and in an instant the adder was nothing more than a terrified rustle in the brushwood.

He took Silencieux into his hands.  There was poison on her lips.  For another moment his fancy made him self-conscious, and turned Silencieux again into a symbol,—­though it was but for a moment.

“There is always poison on the lips of Art,” he said to himself.

CHAPTER IX

THE WONDERFUL WEEK.

As Antony and Silencieux became more and more to each other, poor Beatrice, though she had been the first occasion of their love, and little as she now demanded, seldom as Antony spoke to her, seldom as he smiled upon her, distant as were the lonely walks she took, infrequent as was her sad footfall in the little wood,—­poor Beatrice, though indeed, so far from active intrusion upon their loves, and as if only by her breathing with them the heavy air of that green unwholesome valley, was becoming an irksome presence of the imagination.  They longed to be somewhere together where Beatrice had never been, where her sad face could not follow them; and one night Silencieux whispered to Antony:—­

“Take me to the sea, Antony—­to some lonely sea.”

“To-morrow I will take you,” said Antony, “where the loneliest land meets the loneliest sea.”

On the morrow evening the High Muses had once more made Antony late for dinner.  One hour, and two hours, went by, and then Beatrice, in alarm, took the lantern and courageously braved the blackness of the wood.