nonsense to the eternal hills. He broke off--half in anger with himself.
Was he changing one illusion for another?

"Fool, no one hears you," and he threw himself face down in the grass
and sobbed.

But a gentle hand was laid upon his shoulder and Beatrice's voice
said,--

"I heard you, Antony--and loved you for it."

So Antony had found the heart of a father when no longer he had a child.




CHAPTER XVIII


THE SECOND TALK ON THE HILLS

"But to think," said Antony presently, in answer to Beatrice's soothing
hand, "to think that I might have lived with a child--and I chose
instead to live with words. In all the mysterious ways of man, is there
anything quite so mysterious as that? Poor dream-led fool, poor lover of
coloured shadows!

"And yet, how proud I was of the madness! How I loved to say that words
were more beautiful than the things for which they stood, and that the
names of the world's beautiful women, Sappho, Fiametta, Guinivere, were