her side of a wall."

And Theophil awoke on a bright wintry morning, with those words still,
it seemed, in the room.

"I am only on the other side of a wall!" Was it but the metaphor-making
of dreams, which will so often take our forgotten speculations and
dramatise them for us into reality, or was it indeed a message? An
instinct which was unamenable to reason, and which was perhaps only a
desire, told him it was a message; and it was no less a message though
it were merely a pictorial symbol of a sense, which was already his in
the daytime, of a new and very real nearness to Jenny.

He had slept right through that night out of sheer bodily weariness.
Weeks of watching and anguish had worn him out, and he never knew that
the poor old mother had laid a benediction on his sleep, looking in upon
him as he slept, the only waking being in that house of sleep.

"He will wake soon enough, poor boy!" she had said, as she went once
more to watch till daylight by the side of the other sleeper.

"O Jenny, Jenny, why did you leave me? You were the apple of my eye, my
Jenny. What will your old mother do now that you are gone?"

So she sat and wailed hour after hour, and sometimes she would raise the
dead girl from her coffin and press her to her bosom; for, though even
Jenny's lover feared her now, that cold unresponsive clay had no fear
for Jenny's mother. It was Jenny still, and though the old woman's creed
told her that Jenny was already an angel in heaven, her heart belied her
faith, and her love made her a Sadducee.

And yet it was her belief in a literal resurrection of the body that was
sorely troubling her old soul during these last hours of watching. For
while Jenny was still conscious of the coming of death, she had been
much tortured by hideous churchyard fancies, imaginations of the
darkness and noisomeness of the grave, and she had wrung from her mother
the promise that she should first be cremated and her ashes be afterward
buried in the family tomb. This was the promise which was lying heavy on
the old woman's heart to-night; and, though her reason told her that the
way of the flames and the way of the flowers alike led to dust, yet the
disintegration by fire seemed to give her a sense of entire destruction
such as the more desultory operations of the earth did not give.

If Jenny must indeed pass right away, the dainty architecture of her
body, so lovingly builded, be laid in ruin; not by the fierce fingers o