mportance; the stars show it its
place in the universe, and teach it a nobler meaning for itself.

No consciousness of his gifts had ever given Theophil any such sense of
his belonging to the chosen and dedicated minority of mankind as this
initiation into the Secret Society of Sorrow. He had been chosen to
represent a sacred order. He stood for no lesser interests than those of
Love and Death. Though he were to represent Coalchester in the House of
Commons, what honour were there in that to one already so
mysteriously honoured?

Tears bring a strange new sight to the eyes, and "a new perception both
of grieving love" made Theophil see, and love to see, many things in the
world he had never noticed before. His eyes were opened to behold the
many mourners who go about the streets, the widows who walk in darkness,
and all the shapes of blackness moving phantom-like through the coloured
traffic; not all true children of sorrow, indeed, though wearing its
habit, but, true or not, symbols of the power and majesty of death in
the world. For the involuntary honour paid to death even by the
ignorantly busy, and happy, he kept ever a grateful and a jealous eye;
and as some funeral _cortege_ passed like a dream, Charon's barge amid
all the motley craft of merchandise and pleasure, he would watch sternly
to see if the fat and prosperous moment would do honour to the carriages
of the king. For a bowed head or a doffed hat he felt a personal
gratitude. And, since Jenny died, he seemed to be always meeting that
phantom procession in the streets.

Once, as he passed along the High Street, he had noticed a crowd round a
dying horse. He stood with the crowd a moment, and then went on his way.
In an hour's time he repassed the place, and there was the dead horse
lying solitary on the side of the street; but he noted with a curious
gladness that some hand had covered it reverently with a horse-cloth.
"So honoured is death," he mused to himself, "that even the humblest
animal on which he shall have set his seal is held sacred from the
common day, and shall not be gazed upon heedlessly by the passer-by."
This seemed the greatest honour he had known paid to the king!

The fascination with which from this time death and all that related to
or remotely suggested it absorbed him, was, he reflected one day with a
surprised recognition of the paradox, no longer the fascination of hate
or dread, but almost love. Death, the arch-enemy of joy, th