ust, say "This
was Jenny!"

No! but sometimes when a bird sings in the stillness, when the moon
rises above the trees, when a breath of secret violets crosses one's
path one knows not whence; sometimes when the rain is sobbing at the
window, or the wind plaining about the doors; sometimes when an unknown
happiness fills the heart, when a great deed has been done, when a
lovely word has been spoken, in seasons of music and in all high
moments, then can one say, "There, listen! _that_ was Jenny."

Jenny was already a legend. She was with the great lovers. Theophil
remained behind only to write her name across the high stars. Then he,
too, would pass through the gates of fire to her side.

As he lay down to rest that night, his eyes fell with a sudden sense of
freshness upon the familiar Botticelli's "Mother and Child," which hung
over his fireplace; and a need that could never be fulfilled awoke in
his soul. If only Jenny could have left him a little child,--a little
girl! He had not seemed so lonely then.

It was so he thought; yet perhaps Jenny's child would but have deepened
his loneliness, like a bird singing in a garden where our love walked
long ago. Yet the cry was from his heart, and the longing brought with
it his first tears. "O Jenny," he sobbed, "if only you had left me a
little child!"

CHAPTER XXIV

THE BEGINNING OF THE PILGRIMAGE--MESSAGE FROM JENNY

If every inclination of his heart had not desired it too, Theophil would
have gone on living at 3 Zion Place, for old Mrs. Talbot's sake; for now
he was literally all she had left in the world, and what greater joy
remained for either than just to sit close by the fire and talk
of Jenny?

3 Zion Place was now a little chapel of memory, where a bowed ancient
woman and a sad-faced young man kept up perpetual services to the holy
dead. A woman of her own years, also acquainted with grief, came to
companion the old woman, a sort of lay sister in this little monastery
of grief. It was so piety began, and thus piety is purest and tenderest
in the worship of the dead. Everything in that house which had taken the
impress of Jenny's fingers, been Jenny's to use or handle, remained
exactly as and where Jenny had placed it. They were as yet as fragrant
of Jenny as a fresh-gathered flower of its own perfume. In a very real
sense indeed Jenny had not died, or she was coming to life again as she
had never lived before; and it was no merely idealised Jenny w