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
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. Then she fell back, her whole body relaxed, she had ceased
coughing, and a wonderful sweetness was stealing over her face. She had
gone all alone into the darkness, and Theophil was alone in the world.

CHAPTER XXII

THE TRYST LETHEAN

Jenny had gone into the darkness, and she had gone alone. Theophil had
not gone with her.

That he had remained behind meant certainly no selfish clinging to life,
and indeed there was a sense, as was presently to appear, in which very
really he had kept young love's old promise and died with Jenny. That he
had not literally fulfilled it was due to those physical conditions of
dying of which in the hour of that promise young love is happily
ignorant; for the promise is usually made in moments of keenly conscious
physical life. Dying together is then figured, perhaps, as climbing hand
in hand the radiant topmost peak of life, with a last splendid leap
together into some immortal morning; and such a marriage in death, a
last union of two lives in some fiery consummation of dying, has been
the lot of some lovers supremely blest.

Some indeed there are whose last earthly moment is a vivid reassertion
of the glory and loveliness of life. They drink the great cup to its
last golden drain, and by their death-beds we seem to be standing at the
laughing founts of being. They are radiant, victorious, even witty, to
the last, when at one swoop of blackness they are extinguished like a
light plunged into a stream.

But for others the cold mists that hang low by Lethe's banks have
already brought forgetfulness before their feet grow icy with the first
step into the dark water. To meet on Lethe-side is to meet, maybe; but
with a sad unrecognising meeting. To lie together in oblivion, with
sightless eyes, and dulled hearts and listless hands,--that was not