This sharing with the dead seemed to Theophil the essential of faithfulness,—­faithfulness taking many forms, sometimes maybe misrepresentative of itself, and seldom perhaps informing its conventional externals.

A time will come in the profoundest griefs when those rituals to which young grief is so eager to vow itself will grow lifeless and conventional, the daily tasks of remembrance become as the told beads of pattered prayers.  Let the worshipper of relics beware lest his treasures some day turn on his hands to so much irksome lumber, and true sorrow be thus humiliated.

No! the service for the dead which is most likely to remain a vital offering of the heart is not the ceremonial sorrow of specially consecrated times and seasons, but rather the simple longing in hours of joy that they could have been with us.  To think of our dead friends as always in their shrouds is a way of remembrance which we shall not long have heart or even interest to follow.  It is only by taking them to our feasts, keeping up with them the same old human companionship, that we may hope to keep the dead as friends.  A modern poet has written eight lines which were of great comfort to Theophil,—­

     “You go not to the headstone
       As aforetime every day,
     And I who died, I do not chide,
       Because, dear friend, you play;

     “But in your playing think of him
       Who once was kind and dear,
     And if you see a beauteous thing,
       Just say:  ‘He is not here.’”

Here it seemed to Theophil was the whole duty of faithfulness.  The dead know that if we remember them in our hours of joy, they are indeed remembered; and if they know anything at all, they will understand the waywardness of sad hearts better than sad hearts understand themselves.

Yet, indeed, save in the exercise of his faculties, Theophil had no joy to reproach himself with.  Surely returning spring, with its terrible exuberance of warm life, was no joy.  Perhaps he had looked on Jenny lying dead with less anguish than he one day beheld an apple-tree thick with blossom in the hot sun.  Yes! the world had the heart to go on, to bud and build, and sing,—­though Jenny was gone.  And in that bright spring, see horrible and useless age still hobbling out into the beam!  What was life but one huge Mephistopheles laugh beneath the windows of our dreams!

That spring James Whalley persuaded Theophil to walk with him for a week of country lanes far beyond Coalchester, letting him talk of Jenny all the time.  Jenny had never been here!  If only Jenny could have seen that view!  Jenny had never known that flower!  Did he remember those verses from James Thomson:—­

     “The chambers of the mansions of my heart,
     In every one whereof thine image dwells,
     Are black with grief eternal for thy sake.

     “The inmost oratory of my soul,
     Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or dead,
     Is black with grief eternal for thy sake.