ion of the divine honours due to death,
that these little awestruck scholars should be taken in threes and fours
to look at Teacher for the last time.

This was the third day, and Jenny was already in her coffin. The first
bloom of death, that light that lingers awhile in the face like a sunset
tranquil and blessed, a smile of immortal promise in the very moment of
mortality, had faded. Jenny's face by this was really dead, a mask of
drawn and sunken wax. She seemed now some fantastic doll, some ghastly
waxwork image of death such as we see carried on the stage in tragic
plays. The reality of death had gone with the coming of its funereal
trappings. But the little girls, who had to be lifted up one by one to
gaze with curious, scared faces into that harsh box, deeper and deeper
into which, as through beds of flowers and veils of gauze, Teacher was
sinking, knew nothing of these thoughts. They looked and wondered in
hushed bewilderment, and went their ways. It was evidently an occasion
when children were to keep more than usually quiet--and was it really
Teacher in that strange deep box? It was rather meaningless, but it was
certainly very strange and solemn, and you were allowed to cry.

Of the others who came to see Jenny, I shall not speak,--the vulgar
sight-seers, the creepy old women, connoisseurs in beautiful death, for
whom a neighbour's funeral was like an invitation to the grand opera,
but on whom perhaps one should not be too severe, for even such coarse
sensitiveness to a mystery is the crude beginning of the poetic.

The night before Jenny was given back to the elements Theophil dreamed a
dream, and afterwards he liked to think that he had dreamed it while
Jenny's body was still in the house with him, for then it might be
interpreted that her spirit was still there too, waiting for its final
release from the clay which God had sent her to animate for a while, as
an artist imprisons a lovely thought in a vase of alabaster.

Theophil dreamed that he and some friends were gay together in a room,
just before setting out for a theatre; and as they laughed and talked
there came a little tapping on the wall, so that they grew silent and
listened. Then through the wall was heard a faint but glad little voice
speaking. It was Jenny's voice.

"I can hear you all," she said; "you are off to the theatre. I wish I
were going with you. Never mind, we are not so far away from each other
as you think. I am only on the ot