“I kneel beside thee and I clasp the cross,
     With eyes for ever fixed upon that face,
     So beautiful and dreadful in its calm.

     “I kneel here patient as thou liest there;
     As patient as a statue carved in stone,
     Of adoration and eternal grief.

     “While thou dost not awake I cannot move;
     And something tells me thou wilt never wake,
     And I alive feel turning into stone.”

Strange joy of sad poetry for sad hearts!

Experience indeed was now divided for Theophil into what Jenny had not seen or known and into what she had seen and known; and it was one of the tricks of his grief, as time went on, to confuse the two.  Sometimes he would think that Jenny had been with him at a certain place, or perhaps had read a certain book which, on taking thought, he knew she could never have seen.

Allied perhaps to this confusion was the fancy that possessed him on certain days that he caught glimpses of Jenny in little flitting figures of women about the streets.  A sudden poise of the head, the way of doing the hair, a trick of walk,—­just a flash and gone again; though sometimes he was haunted with more persistent resemblances, which brought him a curious mixture of joy and pain.  And this perhaps is the place to record what only those acquainted with grief will understand, and not all of those,—­for grief has many contradictory fashions.

Till he had loved Jenny, women had played little or no part in Theophil’s life; but with Jenny’s death he found, to his surprise, that the idea of woman was strangely sweet to him.  His eyes were drawn after women in the street, and he found himself longing sometimes for some woman on whose shoulder he might lean his head and weep out his grief for Jenny!  He loved death because Jenny had died; was he to love women because Jenny had been a woman?  Perhaps his feet had wandered in dangerous paths at this time, had it not been for the restrictions which his calling laid upon him.

These, however, did not deny him the theatre, which it had been part of his programme at New Zion to advocate, though there was seldom anything worth seeing at Coalchester Theatre Royal.  Yet sometimes a good London company would call there on its provincial progress, and it chanced one day, looking into a shop window, that Theophil caught sight of a photograph of a woman that startled him with its remarkable resemblance to Jenny.  It was the prima donna of a Gaiety burlesque.  Such was the strange shape Jenny had for the moment taken!

For the first time after her death Theophil was at the theatre that evening.  The bright lights and the music pierced him as with swords.  Once more he saw that apple-tree thick with blossom in the hot sun.  Yet his fancy found grim spells to lay the insolent ghost of life, and death ever at his side whispered that all this light and music and dancing was for but a little while; that those gay rouged faces, so confident in laughing beauty, and all those nimble shapes, were to the eye that had looked beyond life already stark in their coffins, with chin-cloths about their nerveless jaws.  Surely the lover would trip in the shroud that was plainly to be seen from his feet to his lips!