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For it was not Jenny alone that had died, but it was a consolation to Theophil in those hours of self-torture which are among the earliest and most cruel developments of grief, to realise how much of himself had died with her, after all.
Those were very sweet hours, perhaps the sweetest their love had ever known, so cosy and homelike, and yet without fear. But one evening, when Jenny had been coughing, there was blood on the bosom of her nightdress, and as Theophil saw it, his heart stood still with terror.
In a very real sense indeed Jenny had not died, or she was coming to life again as she had never lived before; and it was no merely idealised Jenny who was henceforward to fill up all her lover's thoughts and speak to him in every sight and sound, but just the human Jenny, with her faults and all. On these such little faults! Theophil ever loved to dwell.
"What does she remind you of?" said Jenny presently, with candid admiration. "I know! Why, of course, she just is the very woman. Wait I'll go and fetch it;" and Theophil and Isabel were thus left for a moment or two alone, a fact of no importance beyond this, that it was the first moment in their lives that they had ever been together alone.
Talbot moving his chair in the kitchen. Had anyone told Theophil that in another six months he too would be a memory, and that the future to which he looked, now with a sense of new worlds to be conquered, now with a sense of weariness, was suddenly to close down on him like a dropped curtain, he would have smiled half sadly, and half proudly.
Alas! the power of the dead is but the power of the ideal, at once the strongest and the weakest force in the world, a power, indeed, that prevails, but which may in some moments be shattered by the frailest whisper of the real. Isabel was calling, and Theophil was mad to go. Come back he might, but go he must, he would. Yes! he was going.
As Isabel and Theophil entered the hall together, and smiled a recognising smile at Jenny already in her place, she was able to smile back at them, though there were some who thought she looked very white, and found her very quiet when they tried to talk to her.
How often did Jenny bend lovingly over that drawer, which by now had spread itself over a whole chest of drawers, for home was growing, growing, only a few more months and it would have grown so big and real that nothing but a little house would hold it. And Theophil was brought sometimes to peep in too, "O love, think of it our little home."
It is fated as the union of magnetic powers, it obeys chemic laws of irresistible combination. They are Isabel and Theophil, that is their love; they are in the world together, that is their marriage. But passion will not be all day a tragedian. He has many moods.
She dabbled with her hands aimlessly among its piteous treasures, laughing low to herself. Suddenly a fit of coughing took her, and a great choking was in her throat. She was seen to be battling for her breath. For an instant she drew herself up, and lifted her hand as though she would wave farewell, smiled a faint little smile at Theophil, making, too, as if she would speak.
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