had the heart to go on, to
bud and build, and sing,--though Jenny was gone. And in that bright
spring, see horrible and useless age still hobbling out into the beam!
What was life but one huge Mephistopheles laugh beneath the windows of
our dreams!

That spring James Whalley persuaded Theophil to walk with him for a week
of country lanes far beyond Coalchester, letting him talk of Jenny all
the time. Jenny had never been here! If only Jenny could have seen that
view! Jenny had never known that flower! Did he remember those verses
from James Thomson:--

"The chambers of the mansions of my heart,
In every one whereof thine image dwells,
Are black with grief eternal for thy sake.

"The inmost oratory of my soul,
Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or dead,
Is black with grief eternal for thy sake.

"I kneel beside thee and I clasp the cross,
With eyes for ever fixed upon that face,
So beautiful and dreadful in its calm.

"I kneel here patient as thou liest there;
As patient as a statue carved in stone,
Of adoration and eternal grief.

"While thou dost not awake I cannot move;
And something tells me thou wilt never wake,
And I alive feel turning into stone."

Strange joy of sad poetry for sad hearts!

Experience indeed was now divided for Theophil into what Jenny had not
seen or known and into what she had seen and known; and it was one of
the tricks of his grief, as time went on, to confuse the two. Sometimes
he would think that Jenny had been with him at a certain place, or
perhaps had read a certain book which, on taking thought, he knew she
could never have seen.

Allied perhaps to this confusion was the fancy that possessed him on
certain days that he caught glimpses of Jenny in little flitting figures
of women about the streets. A sudden poise of the head, the way of doing
the hair, a trick of walk,--just a flash and gone again; though
sometimes he was haunted with more persistent resemblances, which
brought him a curious mixture of joy and pain. And this perhaps is the
place to record what only those acquainted with grief will understand,
and not all of those,--for grief has many contradictory fashions.

Till he had loved Jenny, women had played little or no part in
Theophil's life; but with Jenny's death he found, to his surprise, that
the idea of woman was strangely sweet to him. His eyes were drawn after
women in the street, a