She
wore a hood of finely woven shadows, yet, though she drew it close,
sunbeams trooping westward flashed strange lights across her haunted
face.
The birds that lived in the wood had broken out into sudden singing as
she stole in, hungry for silence, passionate to be alone; and at the
foot of every tree she cried "Hush! Hush!" to the bedtime nests. When
all but one were still, she slipped the hood from her face and listened
to her own bird, the night-jar, toiling at his hopeless love from a
bough on which already hung a little star.
Then it was that a young man, with a face shining with sorrow, vaulted
lightly over the mossed fence and dipped down the green path, among the
shadows and the toadstools and the silence.
"Silencieux," he said over to himself--"I love you, Silencieux."
Far down the wood came and went through the trees the black and white
gable of a little chalet to which he was dreaming his way.
Suddenly a small bronze object caught his eye moving across the mossy
path. It was a beautiful beetle, very slim and graceful in shape, with
singularly long and fine antennae.
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