Their love is a property of eternal elements.  It is fated as the union of magnetic powers, it obeys chemic laws of irresistible combination.  They are Isabel and Theophil,—­that is their love; they are in the world together,—­that is their marriage.

But passion will not be all day a tragedian.  He has many moods.  He is a great wit,—­how bright, how bright, he makes the brain!—­a merry comrade, a little, tender, silly child; and these two sad ones laughed together, too, in the still woods,—­for was not the most exquisite humourist in the world their companion, love, who is all things by turns, and all things wise?

And they feasted together, wine and great grapes, spread out on the earth’s green table; and they called each other silly, beautiful names, and they feigned sad little glad stories—­and called the wood their home:  this was their breakfast-oak, and that glade should be their great hall, and high, high up in yonder beech, where the squirrel was sitting, should be their secret little bed-chamber, hung in blue and green, with a ceiling of stars.  They should climb it each night on a ladder of moonlight, and slide down from it each morning on the first strong rays of the sun.  And sometimes if it frightened them with being too near heaven, they would seek out a dell of fine moss and creep close together into the arms of the kind earth-mother, and then sleep while the stars kept watch.

O, yes, it would be a wonderful life together.

Then suddenly the child’s play would cease, as the birds stop singing with the coming of the stars, and silence would sweep over them again, and a great kiss would leap out of the silence, like a flame that lights up heaven from north to south, and they would hang together, lost in an anguish of desire.

The setting sun was turning the wood into halls of strange light, and spreading golden couches here and there in its deep recesses.

“Theophil...” sighed Isabel.

“Wife...” sighed Theophil—­(ah!  Jenny!) and then a voice that seemed to be neither’s, and yet seemed to be the voice of both,—­a voice like a dove smothered in sweetness between their breasts,—­said, “Let us go deeper into the wood.”

Later, when the stars had come, two white faces came glimmering from the innermost chancel of the wood’s green darkness.  They passed close together, still as phantoms among the trees, and when they came out on to the lane they stood still.

“Theophil,” said one voice, “if I should be dying, and I should send for you, will you promise me to come?”

“Isabel,” said another voice, “if I should be dying, and I should send for you, will you promise me to come?”

And each voice vowed to the other, and said, “I would come, and I would go with you.”

And all these words had once been Jenny’s, but they had been Isabel’s first.

CHAPTER XIX