“The doctor said I shall be better in a month or six weeks,” she said aloud, and tried to look as though she were happy.

“Didn’t I say so, dearie?” said old Mrs. Talbot, whom, curiously, love made blind instead of prophet-sighted.

“Yes; and then we’ll go together to those blue skies and that bright air,” said Theophil.

“Yes, dear,” said Jenny, closing her eyes wearily.

Presently she opened them again, and said, “Won’t you read something to me, Theophil?”

“What shall I read, dear?”

“Something amusing, love.  ‘Alice in the Looking-Glass,’ eh?  It’s such a long time since we read that.  Don’t you remember how once long ago we could never get the Walrus and the Carpenter out of our heads?”

So Theophil read the hallowed nonsense once again, struck with the fantastic incongruity of the moment.  Even the dying have to go on living, and must be treated like living folks,—­for a little while longer; and, though they are slipping away, slipping away, under your very eyes, there are merciful hours when you forget that they are dying.  You read to them, talk to them, gossip about neighbours,—­they are going to die, and yet they are quite interested in Mrs. Smith’s new baby,—­you laugh together over little jokes in the newspapers, and then suddenly the bell of your thoughts goes tolling:  “They are going to die—­have you forgotten they are going to die?—­Think! there is so much to say before they go—­O, think of it all—­miss nothing, watch their faces every moment of the day—­for soon you shall torture yourself in vain to remember just that curve of the mouth, that droop of the chin.  Ask them everything now—­tell them all—­delay not—­take farewell of that voice, that laugh, those living eyes—­for they—­are going to die.”

Death was kind as long as he might be to Jenny’s face, so that for some days old Mrs. Talbot still failed to see his shadowy mark there; but at last she knew what Jenny and Theophil had both striven to hide from her and from each other.

“My poor little girl, my poor boy!” she said over and over to herself from that time, but she did not cry or break down.

It was a pathetic sign of what was coming, that she now allowed Theophil sometimes to be Jenny’s nurse through the night hours.  There was to be no bridal bed for these lovers, but thus the tender quiet hours of the night were theirs even in so sad a fashion.

One night, in the haunted hushed middle of it, the old mother had softly pushed open the door to ask if all went well, and in a whisper Theophil had assured her.  A night-light gave an uncanny shadow-breeding light in the room.  Jenny was sleeping peacefully, her tired ivory face, with her dark elf-locks falling about it, framed on the pillow.  Theophil raised himself softly in his chair and looked at her.  She would sleep some while yet.  Then from sheer weariness—­grief’s best friend—­he too fell into a light sleep.  From this he was