unlocked the door, every sound he made echoing fatefully in the silent
wood; and when he had found a place for the image and hung her there,
she certainly looked a ghostly companion for the midnight lamp, in the
middle of a wood.

How strangely she smiled, the smile almost of one taking possession.

No wonder Beatrice had been frightened. Was there some mysterious life
in the thing, after all? Why should these indefinite forebodings come
over him as he looked at her!--But he was growing as childish as
Beatrice. Surely midnight, a dark wood, a lantern, and a death-mask,
with two owls whistling to each other across the valley, were enough to
account for any number of forebodings! But Antony shivered, for all
that, as he locked the door and hastened back again down the wood.




CHAPTER III


THE NORTHERN SPHINX

Antony had not written a poem to his wife since their little girl Wonder
had been born, now some four years ago. Surely it was from no lack of
love, this silence, but merely due to the working of what would seem to
be a law of the artistic temperament: that to turn a muse into a wife,
however long and faithfully loved, is to bid good-bye to the muse. But a
day or two after the coming of Silencieux, Antony found himself suddenly
inspired once more to sing of his wife. It was the best poem he had