It is on the little graves that the sun first rises at morn, and it is there at evening that the moon lays softly her first silver flowers.
There the wren will sometimes bring her sky-blue eggs for a gift, and the summer wind come sowing seeds of magic to take the fancy of the little one beneath. Sometimes it shakes the hyacinths like a rattle of silver, and spreads the turf above with a litter of coloured toys.
Here the butterflies are born with the first warm breath of the spring. All the winter they lie hidden in the crevices of the stone, in the carving of little names, and with the first spring day they stand delicately and dry their yellow wings on the little graves. There are the honeycombs of friendly bees, and the shelters of many a timid earth-born speck of life no bigger than a dewdrop, mysteriously small. Radiant pin-points of existence have their palaces on the broad blades of the grasses, and in the cellars at their roots works many a humble little slave of the mighty elements.
Yes, the emperors and the ants of Nature's vast economy alike love to be kind to the little graves.
CHAPTER XV
SILENCIEUX ALONE IN THE WOOD.
Beatrice's grief for Wonder was such as only a mother can know. She had but one consolation,—the kind sad eyes of Antony. She had lost Wonder, but Antony had come back again. Wonder was not so dead as Antony had seemed a month ago.
When they had left Wonder and were back in the house which was now twice desolate, Antony took Beatrice's hands very tenderly and said:—
"I have been very wrong all these months. For a shadow I have missed the lovely reality of a little child—and for a shadow, my own faithful wife, I have all this time done you cruel wrong. But my eyes are open now, I have come out of the evil dream that bound me—and never shall I enter it again. Let us go from here. Let us leave this valley and never come back to it any more."