[Footnote 1: Of course, the writer is aware that while "Silencieux" is
feminine, her name is masculine. In such fanciful names, however, such
license has always been considered allowable.]




CHAPTER II


THE COMING OF SILENCIEUX

The manner in which Antony had found and come to love Silencieux was a
strange illustration of that law by which one love grows out of
another--that law by which men love living women because of the dead,
and dead women because of the living.

One day as chance had sent him, picking his way among the orange boxes,
the moving farms, and the wig-makers of Covent Garden, he had come upon
a sculptor's shop, oddly crowded in among Cockney carters and decaying
vegetables. Faces of Greece and Rome gazed at him suddenly from a broad
window, and for a few moments he forsook the motley beauty of modern
London for the ordered loveliness of antiquity.

Through white corridors of faces he passed, with the cold breath of
classic art upon his cheek, and in the company of the dead who live for
ever he was conscious of a contagion of immortality.

Soon in an alcove of faces he grew conscious of a presence. Some one was
smiling near him. He turned, and, almost with a start, found that--as he