But for others the cold mists that hang low by Lethe’s banks have already brought forgetfulness before their feet grow icy with the first step into the dark water.  To meet on Lethe-side is to meet, maybe; but with a sad unrecognising meeting.  To lie together in oblivion, with sightless eyes, and dulled hearts and listless hands,—­that was not love’s meaning.

And not only are the dying thus drugged out of knowledge before they die, but those who stand near them grow drowsed, too, by the fumes of the poppies of death.  The dying have forgotten; the living are numb and foolish and in a dream.  All they love on earth is passing away beneath their very eyes, and they cannot understand,—­cannot realise that this, this is death.

Except in moments of piercing agony, days and weeks afterwards, moments that were similarly soothed away again by that mysterious narcotic property which pain at its highest brings with it (pain at its highest being its own anaesthetic), Theophil never realised that Jenny had died, and least of all at the moment when she was dying.  Long after he remembered how he had said to himself:  “There is Jenny dying, dying.  A few more seconds and she will be beyond the sound of your voice for ever.  Call to her; she can still, perhaps, hear you.  O my Jenny, my Jenny!  Louder, louder,—­hold her tighter, tighter,—­she is slipping away.  O God, she is slipping away.  No love can hold her back.  My Jenny, my Jenny!”

And all the time he had been curiously calm, almost unfeeling,—­as one standing stupefied in the presence of fate.  The air seemed full of boding sounds, echoes of low thunder, as from a distant world in the throes of portentous change; and he told himself mechanically that he should know the meaning of those sounds some day.  He should wake up soon from this unnatural torpor of pain to an empty house of life, through the cold halls of which he would seek in vain for Jenny for evermore.

Meanwhile, he suddenly found himself standing with his back to the fire in the lighted study, talking to Mr. Moggridge, who, late as was the hour, had called for news, and had stayed on from a perception that the young minister had best have some one to talk to as far into the morning as he would go on talking.  They were talking in a business-like way of Zion; and Theophil was smoking cigarette after cigarette.  He was terribly clear-headed and bright-witted, and Mr. Moggridge looked at him sometimes with a sort of fear.

It was about three in the morning when the door was softly opened by Mrs. Talbot.

“Will you come now, and see our little girl?” she said, with a voice that could say no more.

Theophil followed her, and, still in a dream, he stood in Jenny’s room, grown strangely solemn and sweet since he was last there,—­was it a thousand years ago?  And there was Jenny lying asleep with a wonderful smile on her face.  She had a little gold chain round her neck and a white crysanthemum in the bosom of her night-gown, and you thought of some princess lying in enchanted sleep in an Arabian night.  It seemed so light a sleep and yet somehow so eternal.  You stept softly, you spoke low, lest you should awaken her—­not carelessly shall one disturb that imperious slumber.