“Beauty always does,” was the young minister’s reply.

“Besides,” he presently resumed, “we are glad to have been Nonconformists—­once.  A Puritan training is a good thing—­to look back upon.  You are all the more thorough in your pleasures, the truer humanist, for something of it still lurking in your blood.”

“Yes, of course you’re right.  I don’t like the word ‘pagan’; but for want of a better, we might say that the best pagans have come of Puritan stock.  Besides, it is half the romance of life to have something to escape from, isn’t it?”

“And someone to escape with the other half,” responded Theophil, nimble as a real town wit.

O it was a wonderful night.  Let us build five tabernacles!

“Good-night, dear Jenny.”

“Good-night, dear wonderful Isabel.”

So at last the two girls bade each other good-night at the door of Jenny’s bedroom, where Isabel was to sleep.

Masterful youth!  So wild to take, so eager to surrender, the Christian name.  Strange, what passion sometimes can be put into a Christian name!

When the door was shut on Isabel, she made no haste to undress.  Indeed, she sat down on the side of the bed as though she had been waiting to sit down for ever so long, sat very still as in a dream, and an hour went by and she was still sitting and gazing in front of her.

And downstairs in the study, where the lamps were still burning, Theophil was sitting by the fire in just the same curiously wrought and withdrawn way, with just the same eyes.

Isabel’s room was over his.  Presently she heard him moving about; then she heard him coming upstairs.  For a moment the air seemed to grow warm, as she heard him softly pass her room; then she heard him close his door.

She shook her reverie from her, as though it had been a black veil full of stars, and began to undress.  Presently her eyes fell on a little pile of handkerchiefs, with needle and cotton, and little letters printed on dainty tapes, beside it.  Jenny had forgotten to put away her sewing.

Isabel took up one of the handkerchiefs, to which the needle and thread were still attached, and read “Jenny Lond ...” (Don’t you know that’s bad luck, Jenny?)

“So soon as that!  Is it so soon as that?” she sighed.

Happy Jenny!

CHAPTER XIII

IN WHICH JENNY KISSES MR. MOGGRIDGE

Isabel was leaving very early next morning for London, so good-byes must be brief.  Jenny and Theophil saw her off at the station, but before leaving Zion Place there had been a moment in which for the second time in their lives she and Theophil had been alone.

They had stood together in the little study and taken each other’s hands, without a word, and they had looked into each other’s faces as those look whom a look must last a long time.