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.
"I love you, Silencieux," he said.

And then she spoke.
"If you love me, Antony," she said, "if you love me--" "O what, Silencieux ?" he cried, his heart growing cold once more.
"Come nearer, Antony.

Put your ear to my lips--Antony, if you love me--the human sacrifice." "O God," he cried, "here in the sunlight--It is true--" And, a man with the doom of his nature heavy upon him, he once more went out into the wood..