Antony's heart chilled with terror at Silencieux's words. It was against this that the voices had warned him as he came up the wood. O that he had never seen Silencieux more, never heard her poisonous voice again!
As one fleeing before the shadow of uncommitted sin that gains upon him at each stride, Antony fled from the place, and sought the moors. The moon was near its setting, and soon the dawn would throw open the eastern doors of the sky. He walked on and on, waiting, praying for, stifling for the light; and, at last, with a freshening of the air, and faint sounds of returning consciousness from distant farms, it came.
High over a lake of ethereal silver welling up out of space, hung the morning star, shining as though its heart would break, bright as a tear that must slip down the face of heaven and fall amid the grass.
As Antony looked up at it, his soul escaped from its prison of dark thought, and such an exaltation had come with the quickening light, that it seemed as though the body, with little more than pure aspiration to wing it, might follow the soul's flight to that crystal sphere.
In that moment, Antony knew that the love in the soul of man is mated only with the infinite universe. In no marriage less than that shall it find lasting fulfilment of itself. No single face, however beautiful, no single human soul, however vast, can absorb it. Silencieux, Beatrice, Wonder, himself, all faded away, in a trance-like sense of a stupendous passion, an august possession. He felt that within him which rose up gigantic from the earth, and towered into eyries of space, from whence that morning star seemed like a dewdrop glittering low down upon the earth.
It was the god in him that knew itself for one brief space, a moment's awakening in the sleep of fact.
Could a god so great, so awakened, be again the slave of one earthly face?
Yes, the greater the god, the greater the slave; and so it was that, falling plumb down from that skyey exaltation, human again with the weakness that follows divine moments, Antony returned from the morning star to Silencieux.
Her face was bathed in the delicate early sunlight and looked very pure and gentle, and he kissed her.
Surely those terrible words had been an illusion of the dark hours. Silencieux had never said them. He kissed her again.