ct with
wonder--had he been so vital, so efficient, so brilliant. His powers had
acquired a firmness, an alertness, a force of influence and attraction,
they had never possessed before. Of a sudden he found himself mature, a
calm master of his gifts.

Yet those who sat near him at those meetings might have noticed that as
he sat down, pale amid plaudits, and crossed his hands upon his knees,
and while his political colleagues were complimenting him to the
audience on the mellow thunder of his political oratory, he was smiling
furtively to himself. "It's all very funny, isn't it, Jenny?" he was
saying in his heart.

Indeed it was hardly recognisable to himself as a fancy that whenever he
spoke Jenny was somewhere in the audience. Sometimes a remote face might
bear a chance resemblance to her, and he would humour himself with the
thought that that was Jenny. For, with that self-consciousness which no
modern mind can escape, he found a certain sad pleasure sometimes in
noting the tricks grief played with him, loving and encouraging all its
fancies--if fancies indeed they were.

When at other times he tried to think clearly, to strip himself of the
illusions, as others would no doubt call them, in which he now lived,
his thinking rather confirmed than dispersed them; and the more he
pondered, the more he failed to realise that Jenny was dead, the surer
became his consciousness that she was nearer to him (a very part of him
as it were) than she had ever been in the days when others could still
hear her voice and note her presence in a room. Her very death had given
him a paradoxical certitude of her immortality.

Yet this recognition of her presence, on some plane of spiritual
apprehension, was none the less consistent with a piercing sense of her
loss on the plane where love once moved in visible beauty. That heavenly
lover in him was able to give none of the comfort of its assurance to
the earthly lover. That the eyes of the spirit could touch her, brought
no healing to the eyes that at midnight would look up from the desk in
Theophil's study to Jenny's empty chair, no touch of her to the hands
that were so idle and empty now.

Yet there were little services these hands might still do for her.
There in her own little room her own books still stood in their places.
These could be taken care of, her little desk could still be kept as she
had left it, with her pen laid down as she had last laid it. There were
note-paper