not know,
was not to know. How was one to talk to her--talk of being well again,
and books and country walks, when she had so plainly done with all
these things? How bear up when she, with a half-sad, half-amused
smile, showed her thin wrists?--how say that they would soon be strong
and round again? Ugh! she was already beginning to be different from
us, already putting off our body-sweet mortality, and putting on the
fearful garments of death, changing before our eyes from ruddy
familiar humanity into a being of another element, an element we dread
as the fish dreads the air. Soon we should not be able to talk to
her. Soon she would have unlearnt all the sweet grammar of earth. She
was no longer Jenny, but a fearful symbol of mysteries at which the
flesh crept. She was going to die.

Have you never looked ahead towards some trial, some physical trial,
maybe an operation?--for perhaps the pains of the body are the
keenest, after all--those of the spirit are at least in some part
metaphor. You look forward with dread, yet it is at last over. It is
behind you. And have you never thought that so it will be with death
some day? Poor little Jenny was to face the great operation.

Next time I saw her she was dead. In our hateful English fashion, they
had shut her up in a dark room, and we had to take candles to see
her. I shall never forget the moment when my eyes first rested on that
awful snow-white sheet, so faintly indented by the fragile form
beneath, lines very fragile, but oh! so hard and cold, like the
indentations upon frozen snow; never forget my strange unaccountable
terror when he on one side and I on the other turned down the icy
sheet from her face. But terror changed to awe and reverence, as her
face came upon us with its sweet sphinx-like smile. Lying there, with
a little gold chain round her neck and a chrysanthemum in the bosom of
her night-gown, there was a curious regality about her, a look as
though she wore a crown our eyes were unable to see. And while I gazed
upon her, the sobs of my friend came across the bed, and as he called
to her I seemed to hear the eternal Orpheus calling for his lost
Eurydice. Poor lad!--poor maid! Here, naked and terrible, was all the
tragedy of the world compressed into an hour, the Medusa-face of life
that turns the bravest to stone. Surely, I felt, God owed more than He
could ever repay to these two lovers, whom it had been so easy to
leave to their simple joys. And fro