Theophil dreamed that he and some friends were gay together in a room, just before setting out for a theatre; and as they laughed and talked there came a little tapping on the wall, so that they grew silent and listened.  Then through the wall was heard a faint but glad little voice speaking.  It was Jenny’s voice.

“I can hear you all,” she said; “you are off to the theatre.  I wish I were going with you.  Never mind, we are not so far away from each other as you think.  I am only on the other side of a wall.”

And Theophil awoke on a bright wintry morning, with those words still, it seemed, in the room.

“I am only on the other side of a wall!” Was it but the metaphor-making of dreams, which will so often take our forgotten speculations and dramatise them for us into reality, or was it indeed a message?  An instinct which was unamenable to reason, and which was perhaps only a desire, told him it was a message; and it was no less a message though it were merely a pictorial symbol of a sense, which was already his in the daytime, of a new and very real nearness to Jenny.

He had slept right through that night out of sheer bodily weariness.  Weeks of watching and anguish had worn him out, and he never knew that the poor old mother had laid a benediction on his sleep, looking in upon him as he slept, the only waking being in that house of sleep.

“He will wake soon enough, poor boy!” she had said, as she went once more to watch till daylight by the side of the other sleeper.

“O Jenny, Jenny, why did you leave me?  You were the apple of my eye, my Jenny.  What will your old mother do now that you are gone?”

So she sat and wailed hour after hour, and sometimes she would raise the dead girl from her coffin and press her to her bosom; for, though even Jenny’s lover feared her now, that cold unresponsive clay had no fear for Jenny’s mother.  It was Jenny still, and though the old woman’s creed told her that Jenny was already an angel in heaven, her heart belied her faith, and her love made her a Sadducee.

And yet it was her belief in a literal resurrection of the body that was sorely troubling her old soul during these last hours of watching.  For while Jenny was still conscious of the coming of death, she had been much tortured by hideous churchyard fancies, imaginations of the darkness and noisomeness of the grave, and she had wrung from her mother the promise that she should first be cremated and her ashes be afterward buried in the family tomb.  This was the promise which was lying heavy on the old woman’s heart to-night; and, though her reason told her that the way of the flames and the way of the flowers alike led to dust, yet the disintegration by fire seemed to give her a sense of entire destruction such as the more desultory operations of the earth did not give.

If Jenny must indeed pass right away, the dainty architecture of her body, so lovingly builded, be laid in ruin; not by the fierce fingers of fire should she be torn asunder, but beneath the kind breath of the sun, and the gentle tears of the rain, might she change and change, and on the wings of soft winds might she be carried to and fro in fragrance about the world.