Two months after Jenny’s death, having spoken at a great meeting on some momentous question of the hour, he found himself the acknowledged leader of the Radical, rather forlorn, hope in Coalchester, and before long invitations were coming to him to help on the same hope in other towns.  Never in his life—­and he used often to meditate on the fact with wonder—­had he been so vital, so efficient, so brilliant.  His powers had acquired a firmness, an alertness, a force of influence and attraction, they had never possessed before.  Of a sudden he found himself mature, a calm master of his gifts.

Yet those who sat near him at those meetings might have noticed that as he sat down, pale amid plaudits, and crossed his hands upon his knees, and while his political colleagues were complimenting him to the audience on the mellow thunder of his political oratory, he was smiling furtively to himself.  “It’s all very funny, isn’t it, Jenny?” he was saying in his heart.

Indeed it was hardly recognisable to himself as a fancy that whenever he spoke Jenny was somewhere in the audience.  Sometimes a remote face might bear a chance resemblance to her, and he would humour himself with the thought that that was Jenny.  For, with that self-consciousness which no modern mind can escape, he found a certain sad pleasure sometimes in noting the tricks grief played with him, loving and encouraging all its fancies—­if fancies indeed they were.

When at other times he tried to think clearly, to strip himself of the illusions, as others would no doubt call them, in which he now lived, his thinking rather confirmed than dispersed them; and the more he pondered, the more he failed to realise that Jenny was dead, the surer became his consciousness that she was nearer to him (a very part of him as it were) than she had ever been in the days when others could still hear her voice and note her presence in a room.  Her very death had given him a paradoxical certitude of her immortality.

Yet this recognition of her presence, on some plane of spiritual apprehension, was none the less consistent with a piercing sense of her loss on the plane where love once moved in visible beauty.  That heavenly lover in him was able to give none of the comfort of its assurance to the earthly lover.  That the eyes of the spirit could touch her, brought no healing to the eyes that at midnight would look up from the desk in Theophil’s study to Jenny’s empty chair, no touch of her to the hands that were so idle and empty now.

Yet there were little services these hands might still do for her.  There in her own little room her own books still stood in their places.  These could be taken care of, her little desk could still be kept as she had left it, with her pen laid down as she had last laid it.  There were note-paper and envelopes, and ink and blotting-paper, all ready, if some day, by a miracle—­who could tell?—­she might steal into that room and want to leave a message.  There should be fresh flowers for her to find there too if she did come.