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 then thought--it was no living thing, but just a plaster cast among the others, that was thus shining, like a star among the dead.

A face not ancient, not modern; but a face of yesterday, to-day, and for ever.
Instantly he knew he had seen the face before.