faithfulness to Jenny in his
love for Isabel during Jenny's life, there could equally be no
unfaithfulness now that she was dead. Moreover, if Jenny still in some
mysterious way kept watch over his life, she would understand his heart
as she could never have understood it when she was alive...

These thoughts brought deep sorrow to him for many days, during which
once more he rebuked himself as "a base person," but, curiously enough,
in one who so despised the world and its opinion, it was an apparently
superficial consideration that was the mainstay of his faithfulness,
against these disloyal suggestions of a life that was thus reawakening
in spite of himself.

There were moments when he could conceive his going to Isabel, and
asking her to share his life with him; but never could he endure the
thought of her bearing that name which seemed so inviolably Jenny's.
Even though Jenny had come to him in a dream and asked him to give her
name to Isabel, there was still the world. Though Jenny might
understand, the world would think he had forgotten Jenny. The minority
of faithful hearts would grow sadder by his seeming apostasy, and the
cynic would strengthen his pessimism by one more illustration of human
inconstancy. The world might hear that he was loving Isabel in some
Aegean isle, and still deem him faithful; for grief is allowed
mistresses, but with a wife it is understood to die.

No! so long as the world lasted no other woman should steal her name
from Jenny's grave.

And this was an unassailable symbol. Here the vital principle of his
faithfulness was entrenched as in an impregnable fortress. He would see
Isabel's heart break ere she should bear Jenny's name.

Yet while he made the vow, his love for Isabel was musical as spring
within his soul, and he dared to tell himself that in God's sight he was
still Isabel's as well as Jenny's.

Thus it came about that one autumn day, when Isabel's letters had lain
unopened through spring and summer, in one sudden impulse of mere
desire he had opened and read them,--not as Jenny's letters, but as
messages for which he himself was hungering. He had released the
incense, and as he kissed the dear writing, he momentarily forgot that
it was written to Jenny, and only remembered that it had come from
Isabel. In the snare of the incense he even accused himself for having
left them unread so long, and then to think that nearly six months had
gone by since the second letter had