The blackness that filled the world was a month ago streaked with gray; three weeks ago there was a line of faint colour in the east; a fortnight, and there are scarlet plumes in the far heaven, and a faint twitter of song; a week, and the whole sky is a commotion of glory and birds.

To meet again!  O to meet again, just to look at each other again!  We are philosophers, we are brave, we shall remember Jenny, but O! the rapture of just beholding each other again.

“Thank God, you are alive! you are real!  O Theophil, there is the little scar on your forehead I’ve been longing to see.”

“Yes! it is Isabel!  She walks just as she did a thousand years ago.  I am carrying her rugs.  How well I remember her umbrella!”

“How fantastic absence is!” said Isabel, as the three friends sat once more that evening in the little study where nothing seemed to have changed, and where they seemed to have been sitting all the hours of those now quite disrespectfully forgotten months.

“Yes, but how real!” said Jenny.  It was Jenny who said “how real!”

How fantastic, too, is the present!  Sometimes, perhaps nearly always, it tortures us with the unreality, the unrealisability of precious moments that are flying, flying, and can never come again; and at other times it equally eludes us with a sense of their indestructibility.  To-night the present had chosen to seem real.  Theophil felt, as he looked at Isabel, that this wonderful nearness could never pass away.  Her dress, her coiled cendre hair, her soft smile, her very attitudes, seemed to wear a curious expression of everlastingness.  Yes, she would sit just like that, and he and Jenny would sit near her for ever and ever.  No mere abstractions like Time and Space could fill with emptiness the place where she now sat and smiled.  In some mystical way eternity had breathed upon this hour and given it immortality.  It had been suddenly touched with a wand into an enchanted permanence.  Theosophists tell of an astral light, where every moment of time endures in strange paintings upon space.  Isabel and Theophil and Jenny were sitting together in the astral light.

And yet the hours had already been flying, for, the recital was already over,—­New Zion more in love with Isabel than ever.  The same little supper as six months ago had been merry and come to an end, the guests had gone, the house was quiet, and this hour that seemed so real was the frail last of that day of dreams.

Yes! but an arrangement had been made which perhaps accounts for the security of that hour.  Isabel’s agents had planned for her a little circular tour in northern towns comparatively adjacent to Coalchester, and when a fortnight of such recitals was ended, she was to return and give still another recital at New Zion.  Then there must be parting, real black parting again.  Meanwhile, the fortnight that lay between the two days of meeting gained a curious sense of being really spent together.  As two walking together on a long road may separate, and one walk till almost out of sight of the other and then slowly return, but the two endure no sense of parting, feeling together all the time, so Isabel and Theophil felt about this fortnight.