here in the universe?

Jenny! Perhaps there had been no Jenny all these months. Perhaps Jenny
stopped being Jenny forever in that last moment when she had tried to
wish him good-bye. And all his daily consciousness of her presence, all
the fancies of his faithful heart, had been idle as the words of a man
talking in his sleep. Those little offerings he had brought to her
altar,--she had never seen them; for perhaps Jenny had been an idol he
had made out of air, while he had been her lonely and unheeded
worshipper.

Was it really like that? and in a few more weeks would he too be as an
eye that had ceased seeing, an ear that had ceased hearing for evermore?

All the wonderful colour and sound of things! Were these waning days to
be his last poor opportunities to sit at the great show?

Yes! the world was slipping like water between his hands--and he might
not be going to Jenny, after all.

As these thoughts began to possess him, another thought which he had so
far resisted grew more importunately pleading--the thought of Isabel.
Perhaps he was going to Jenny, but surely he was leaving Isabel. Had he,
he could not but ask himself, immolated a warm living heart in a
fanatical devotion to a heart long since senseless and cold? Had it not,
after all, been a superstitious veneration towards an ideal of
faithfulness which had been Jenny's rather than his own? Had he in his
heart ever ceased to love Isabel, and had he really believed that to
love her too would have been unfaithfulness to Jenny?

Yes, life was nearly over, but it held the possibility still of one
supreme blessedness. He might look into Isabel's eyes again.

She had but to stand by his side and his poor remnant of life would grow
radiant and rounded as the most complete and blissful destiny. His heart
told him that if Isabel could but once enter the room again, and stay
with him to the end, however near, he would die singing the song of
magnificent life.

Life is tragic, do you say? Life is cruel. Life is a splendid
portico--to nothingness. Ah, no! not if in that portico you have stood
for a moment, loving and beloved, by the side of Isabel. Life is
splendid! life is kind! life is abounding, deep-cupped! and each minute
of it is a prodigal eternity.

Thus it was that one May morning Isabel sat very still in her little
room with a telegram just opened on her lap. The telegram ran: "Jenny is
dead and I am dying. Theophil." And this was the first message I