love's meaning.

And not only are the dying thus drugged out of knowledge before they
die, but those who stand near them grow drowsed, too, by the fumes of
the poppies of death. The dying have forgotten; the living are numb and
foolish and in a dream. All they love on earth is passing away beneath
their very eyes, and they cannot understand,--cannot realise that this,
_this_ is death.

Except in moments of piercing agony, days and weeks afterwards, moments
that were similarly soothed away again by that mysterious narcotic
property which pain at its highest brings with it (pain at its highest
being its own anaesthetic), Theophil never realised that Jenny had died,
and least of all at the moment when she was dying. Long after he
remembered how he had said to himself: "There is Jenny dying, dying. A
few more seconds and she will be beyond the sound of your voice for
ever. Call to her; she can still, perhaps, hear you. O my Jenny, my
Jenny! Louder, louder,--hold her tighter, tighter,--she is slipping
away. O God, she is slipping away. No love can hold her back. My Jenny,
my Jenny!"

And all the time he had been curiously calm, almost unfeeling,--as one
standing stupefied in the presence of fate. The air seemed full of
boding sounds, echoes of low thunder, as from a distant world in the
throes of portentous change; and he told himself mechanically that he
should know the meaning of those sounds some day. He should wake up soon
from this unnatural torpor of pain to an empty house of life, through
the cold halls of which he would seek in vain for Jenny for evermore.

Meanwhile, he suddenly found himself standing with his back to the fire
in the lighted study, talking to Mr. Moggridge, who, late as was the
hour, had called for news, and had stayed on from a perception that the
young minister had best have some one to talk to as far into the
morning as he would go on talking. They were talking in a business-like
way of Zion; and Theophil was smoking cigarette after cigarette. He was
terribly clear-headed and bright-witted, and Mr. Moggridge looked at him
sometimes with a sort of fear.

It was about three in the morning when the door was softly opened by
Mrs. Talbot.

"Will you come now, and see our little girl?" she said, with a voice
that could say no more.

Theophil followed her, and, still in a dream, he stood in Jenny's room,
grown strangely solemn and sweet since he was last there,--was it a
thousand years ago? An