“We longed to tell you,” said Theophil, with his head bowed in distress in Jenny’s lap, while she softly stroked his hair with an absent tenderness, though her eyes looked straight in front of her, and her voice was as if she were talking to herself.

“We longed to tell you,” he repeated.

“O I wish you had.”

“We feared it, dear.”

“Yes, yes, I know.  I was only a little child the day before yesterday.  I have never been worthy to be your wife, dear.  I have known it all the time.  I should never have taken your love.  It has never been mine....”

“But ...” she continued, “I will give it all back now.  It is not too late.  I have kept it pure ... for Isabel.  I can give it to her, darling, with a kind heart—­for she is worthy.  She was born for you, dear.  We were not born for each other, after all—­were we, dear?  I am the woman of that poem, not Isabel.  It is I who must say good-bye.  I can do it.  I am a woman now, love—­not a little child any more.  ’Look in my face and see.’”

The tangle of Theophil’s emotions and thoughts, as he listened to Jenny in silence, was a revelation to him of the strange heart of love, and of the insufficiency of those formulas by which we image ourselves to ourselves.  How little we know of ourselves till we are tested by the powerful reagents of love and danger, and in how many ways must those tests be applied before we learn anything of the elements of which we are composed!

One love will reveal to us one side of our natures and its needs, another will reveal to us another with its needs; and till we grow old we can never be certain that there are not other sides to us that have never been illuminated, other needs that have never been awakened, by an emotion.

A man may love two women equally:  the woman he most needs and the woman who needs him most,—­and in a crisis of choice he will probably choose the latter.

Again, the power of the woman we have loved first has wonderful reserves to draw upon, humble pawns of feelings, memories, associations, not so brilliant to the imagination as the royalties of romance and sentiment on the other side, but incalculably useful in a battle.  Too humble are some of these to gain acknowledgment; indeed they are often so submerged in a total of vague impulses that they escape any individualisation.

In the very hour where all seemed lost to Jenny, Theophil’s love for her was passing in the fire of this ordeal from a love whose elements had never, perhaps, quite combined, into that miraculous metal of true love, which can never again be separated into anything but itself,—­the true gold of love which, in some magical second of projection, has suddenly sprung out of those troubled ingredients of earth and iron, silver, honey, and pearl.

This does not mean that Theophil’s love for Isabel had grown any less real, but that his love for Jenny had grown more real.  For the first time in its history it moved on the stage of the heroic.  Up till now it had lived secure, domestic days; there had been no danger to test its truth, no lights of tragedy or romance thrown across it, it had seemed a simple little earthborn love; whereas Theophil’s love for Isabel had, from its very conditions, walked from the first the high heaven of dreams.