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Updated: May 1, 2025
Yet sometimes a good London company would call there on its provincial progress, and it chanced one day, looking into a shop window, that Theophil caught sight of a photograph of a woman that startled him with its remarkable resemblance to Jenny. It was the prima donna of a Gaiety burlesque. Such was the strange shape Jenny had for the moment taken!
They tried to dissuade her; she grew angry, and struggled so hard to rise, that it seemed best to humour her once more. So, wrapt round with blankets, Theophil lifted her from the bed into a great chair by the fire. Then she asked to be taken to look into her bottom drawer. So they lifted her across to it, and opened it.
She forgot too that she was married to Theophil, and would sometimes babble her heart-breaking fancies of the little home that was so near now, till sometimes Theophil had to hurry away with his unbearable grief to some other room. And Jenny's once rosy apple of a face made one's heart ache to look on now.
Jenny and Theophil saw her off at the station, but before leaving Zion Place there had been a moment in which for the second time in their lives she and Theophil had been alone. They had stood together in the little study and taken each other's hands, without a word, and they had looked into each other's faces as those look whom a look must last a long time.
An audience was already gathered there; but this Theophil and Isabel avoided, entering the building by the minister's private entrance into his vestry, which communicated by a dark staircase with the chapel and the lecture-hall where the recital was to be given. There was a light in the vestry, but no one was there, though they might have expected Mr. Moggridge.
And it was of that kiss that the following May Theophil, all his plans laid aside, engagements cancelled on every hand, eager life suddenly trapped in this choking cul-de-sac, was dying. Death! It was an outrage! He was young, he was powerful! He would not die! There was May at the window. He too was full of May. He would get up and go about his work. He knew he could if they would only let him.
Theophil had knelt down at her side and taken her hand gently and would have kissed her, but that her eyes were so full of pain as she turned them to meet his. Besides, strange words to hear! she was asking him not to kiss her. "Theophil dear, don't kiss me yet. I have something to say, and if you kiss me I shall have no strength to say it." "Jenny!"
Meanwhile, the fortnight that lay between the two days of meeting gained a curious sense of being really spent together. As two walking together on a long road may separate, and one walk till almost out of sight of the other and then slowly return, but the two endure no sense of parting, feeling together all the time, so Isabel and Theophil felt about this fortnight.
"Jenny dear, it will make you so ill; lie down, little girl" and Jenny fell back on her pillow exhausted and coughing, and with eyes unearthly bright. "Theophil," she said suddenly, in that startling way sick people have, "you know that I am going to die!" He could not answer, his voice would have choked in sobs.
Now I would ask it for Isabel and Theophil, who are thus quietly to sacrifice the greatest thing in their lives, the one reality for which they have come into existence, for Jenny's sake. Great is their love for each other, but even greater and stranger must be their involuntary love for an invisible goodness, an ideal of ineffable pity. They are going to die that Jenny may live.
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