as broken, the fit was over. Theophil left no letter for
Isabel, and no message, and the same evening he was once more back in
his little study in Zion Place, wild with remorse. O for the scourge and
the fire! But what penance shall avail to ease that poor little
creature's broken-hearted crying?

"She seems to have had a shock!--She seems to have had a shock!"

CHAPTER XXVIII

BACK IN ZION PLACE

The shame of that wild unfaithfulness burned in Theophil's soul for many
days. It humiliated him like a physical degradation. To have been so
drunkenly untrue! It was one of those shocks to the moral nature from
which it never quite recovers, and Theophil's face lost some of its
steadfastness, his walk some of its firmness, for this perfidy
towards Jenny.

There was only one way to make the sense of it endurable, and he threw
himself into his work with a wasting vehemence. Where was his ambition?
There was so much yet to do. New Zion had long since moved and hummed,
and whizzed, the neighbouring towns had in a measure begun to dance to
his piping, but it must be a long while yet ere his name was to London
and to the world what it was already to Coalchester,--that mere
microcosm of his fame.

And till London knew him as well as Coalchester, there was no real
monument to Jenny. London--no longer the city of Isabel--must learn to
say "Theophilus Londonderry" so naturally, that it would some day serve
as an unforgettable remembrance of Jenny. He must become a great man,
because a great name is the one shrine in which love's memory may escape
oblivion. In the arms of his name Jenny would then be carried down the
years, one woman-star saved from the night of death. Again, the world,
for which in one way he had so little care, was to help him indirectly
to keep his troth to Jenny.

In a sense, the mountain was already coming to this young prophet; for
with the winter some of London's finest spirits were now and again to be
met in that incongruous Zion Place, as visiting lecturers to New Zion.
And each one, as he came, was impressed as Isabel had been on that old
evening when she had discovered her colony of surprise-people. Each
realised in that gravely masterful young minister a power and a force of
attraction which could not long remain hidden in that little country
town. Meanwhile, their visits enabled him to test his own calibre by
comparison with theirs, and to realise that his instincts had not
befooled him, bu