Had no traitor thought ever whispered deep down in the darkness of his consciousness that the way was now open to Isabel?  Such thoughts indeed had come to him, but unwelcomed, involuntarily, as those foul thoughts which will sometimes torture the pure, or those base thoughts which may appal the noble.

The mind, like the body, has its foul humours, which can only be accepted with patience as a part of the inscrutable mechanism of human organisms.  In moments of anger this filth and poison of the mind sometimes comes to the surface to wrong us—­for it is not us, it is in truth just all that we are not.

Thus at times in Theophil’s mind, that was one prayer of faithful love for Jenny, the thought of Isabel would steal, like—­so his stern faithfulness pictured it—­a fair devil in a church.  Yet, if he opened one of those letters he knew there would ascend from it a cloud of subtle incense, which would ... well, which he must never again breathe.

So he would replace them in their drawer, and again, some other day, take them out once more.

Perhaps, after all, it might be his duty, the mere duty of a friend, to open them.  What if Isabel should be ill, should be needing him ... should be dying!

But still the fanaticism of his sorrow conquered, and still week after week they remained unread.

Meanwhile, Isabel was living her life as she had lived it before she had heard of New Zion, with the difference of an internal sense of completion which her love had brought.  Need one say that she had her hours of loneliness and longing, when she would have exchanged a thousand years of love in heaven for a touch of Theophil’s hand upon earth; but these she knew how to conquer, and for most days that union of two separated hearts remained to her as real as when it had been vowed in those silent woods.

At the very moment when Jenny was dying, and Theophil had thrust Isabel away into the furthest, highest, starlight of memory, she was thinking how real their union was, how near he seemed!

CHAPTER XXVI

FURTHER CONCERNING THEOPHIL’S LIFE AFTER THE DEATH OF JENNY

     Knowing the quick but little love
     Much mention of the dead.

I hesitate further to continue that history of a grief of which, nevertheless, this book has now little heart or purpose to be other than the record, and, as what I shall write in this chapter must seem meaningless and wearisome to all but those who belong to the great Secret Society of Sorrow, it were no doubt just as well that those who have known nothing but joy should follow their natural impulse and leave it unread.  I confess, too, that I should feel the more comfortable without the regard of their happy, ignorant eyes.