Several times before she grew too ill, Jenny had had her favourites up in her room on Sunday evenings, to read Bible stories with her, and had sent them away happy with magnificent text-cards, that had hitherto been the arduously won rewards of “attention” and the practice of such school-time virtues over many weeks.

Now, when they heard that Teacher was dead, they felt a vague sorrow.  They knew that people who died were never seen at school any more, and that people always burst out crying when anyone died; so they cried bitterly, these little girls, and the hearts of one or two of them perhaps really ached for a little while.  One of them asked the new teacher, if they would meet their old teacher in heaven, and was told “Yes, if they were good girls,”—­which was something to be good for.

Among the wreaths that already filled Jenny’s room with that piercing smell of lilies which still clung there—­unless it were Theophil’s fancy—­for many months afterwards, was one sent in loving memory “by her Sunday-school class”; and it was a part of that informal lying-in-state, which is an involuntary recognition of the divine honours due to death, that these little awestruck scholars should be taken in threes and fours to look at Teacher for the last time.

This was the third day, and Jenny was already in her coffin.  The first bloom of death, that light that lingers awhile in the face like a sunset tranquil and blessed, a smile of immortal promise in the very moment of mortality, had faded.  Jenny’s face by this was really dead, a mask of drawn and sunken wax.  She seemed now some fantastic doll, some ghastly waxwork image of death such as we see carried on the stage in tragic plays.  The reality of death had gone with the coming of its funereal trappings.  But the little girls, who had to be lifted up one by one to gaze with curious, scared faces into that harsh box, deeper and deeper into which, as through beds of flowers and veils of gauze, Teacher was sinking, knew nothing of these thoughts.  They looked and wondered in hushed bewilderment, and went their ways.  It was evidently an occasion when children were to keep more than usually quiet—­and was it really Teacher in that strange deep box?  It was rather meaningless, but it was certainly very strange and solemn, and you were allowed to cry.

Of the others who came to see Jenny, I shall not speak,—­the vulgar sight-seers, the creepy old women, connoisseurs in beautiful death, for whom a neighbour’s funeral was like an invitation to the grand opera, but on whom perhaps one should not be too severe, for even such coarse sensitiveness to a mystery is the crude beginning of the poetic.

The night before Jenny was given back to the elements Theophil dreamed a dream, and afterwards he liked to think that he had dreamed it while Jenny’s body was still in the house with him, for then it might be interpreted that her spirit was still there too, waiting for its final release from the clay which God had sent her to animate for a while, as an artist imprisons a lovely thought in a vase of alabaster.