The agony of this verse as one reads it is heart-breaking, but as Isabel recited it, it was unbearable, and others in that audience besides Jenny felt the personal cry in the voice, though none but Jenny knew its destination.  But to Jenny’s ears the exquisite wifeliness of the last verse was fuller of pain than all the rest,—­

“Meantime I bless thee.  By these thoughts of mine
I bless thee from all such! 
I bless thy lamp to oil, thy cup to wine,
Thy hearth to joy, thy hand to an equal touch

Of loyal troth.  For me,
I love thee not, I love thee not!—­away! 
There’s no more courage in my soul to say

        ‘Look in my face and see.’”

When Isabel sat down, amid hushed clapping, it was observed that Miss Jenny Talbot had fainted.  Theophil sprang with others to her assistance, and Jenny, being carried into an ante-room for air and water, presently reviving, asked faintly for Mr. Moggridge to take her home, the thought of the big kind man coming into her mind with a sense of homely refuge.

“There, there,” he said, “you’ll be better in a minute;” and when she was strong enough to walk, he took her home, Theophil, filled with sudden misgivings, having to see the evening’s entertainment to its close.

Mr. Moggridge blamed the bad ventilation, as he tenderly helped Jenny along the few yards to home.

“No,” said Jenny, with a big tearing sigh, “I don’t think it was that.  It was that last poem, I think.  It seemed so terrible to think of two people having to part like that; don’t you think so, Mr. Moggridge?”

Mr. Moggridge did.  “And then,” he said, “Miss Strange has such a way of giving it out, it’s almost more than human nature can bear.”

“Yes; her voice,” said Jenny, “seemed like a stream of tears.”

When Theophil and Isabel returned from Zion, they seemed so full of real anxiety, as indeed they were, that Jenny’s poor heart felt just a passing ray of warmth, a little less cast out into eternal loneliness.  She gave the same explanation as to Mr. Moggridge, not significantly, but half intending a kind veiled message to them.  “It seemed so terrible to think of two people having to part like that,” she said again.

And presently she pleaded weariness to go to bed earlier than usual.

“But don’t you hurry, Isabel,” said Jenny.  “You and Theophil will not see each other for a long time again.”

“Sleep well,” said Isabel, kissing her; and as she did so, she thought there was a curious convulsiveness in Jenny’s embrace.

When she had gone, the two looked at each other.  “She seemed strange,” said Isabel.

“I think I will go and see her for a moment,” said Theophil.

So it was that, tapping at Jenny’s door, he found her lying across her bed with the gas still down.  “Crying, dear!” he exclaimed.

“O Theophil dear, don’t come,” she said; “it’s only silly nerves.  Go back to Isabel; I shall be better when I’ve had a sleep.  Do go, dear, like a kind boy.  I’m better by myself.  No ... it is nothing,—­nothing but nerves.  Do go, dear.  Good-night.”