to
open them. What if Isabel should be ill, should be needing him ...
should be dying!

But still the fanaticism of his sorrow conquered, and still week after
week they remained unread.

Meanwhile, Isabel was living her life as she had lived it before she had
heard of New Zion, with the difference of an internal sense of
completion which her love had brought. Need one say that she had her
hours of loneliness and longing, when she would have exchanged a
thousand years of love in heaven for a touch of Theophil's hand upon
earth; but these she knew how to conquer, and for most days that union
of two separated hearts remained to her as real as when it had been
vowed in those silent woods.

At the very moment when Jenny was dying, and Theophil had thrust Isabel
away into the furthest, highest, starlight of memory, she was thinking
how real their union was, how near he seemed!

CHAPTER XXVI

FURTHER CONCERNING THEOPHIL'S LIFE AFTER THE DEATH OF JENNY

Knowing the quick but little love
Much mention of the dead.

I hesitate further to continue that history of a grief of which,
nevertheless, this book has now little heart or purpose to be other than
the record, and, as what I shall write in this chapter must seem
meaningless and wearisome to all but those who belong to the great
Secret Society of Sorrow, it were no doubt just as well that those who
have known nothing but joy should follow their natural impulse and leave
it unread. I confess, too, that I should feel the more comfortable
without the regard of their happy, ignorant eyes.

Sorrow is a mysticism, and to talk of it to those who have never known
the initiation of tears is like talking alchemy to a child. Sorrow,
too, is an aristocracy, and when Theophil came to realise that, as Jenny
had been found worthy to die, he had been found worthy to suffer, it
seemed to him almost vulgar only to have been happy. Happiness is such a
materialist, a creature of coarse tastes and literal pleasures, a
_bourgeois_ who has not yet attained the rank of a soul. The influence
of sorrow on the individual is much what the influence of Christianity
has been upon the world. Christianity, no doubt, has robbed us of
much--but then it has given us sorrow; it has taken away the sun, but it
has brought us the stars. It is only in the starlight of sorrow that we
become conscious of other worlds. The sun flatters our own little world
with the illusion of a transitory i