If women were thus henceforth to influence Theophil, why might not Isabel, the woman whom Jenny had loved, be counted amongst them?

Isabel was the one woman in the whole world whom Theophil’s faithfulness could not transform into Jenny.  That it had been his fatal love for her that had brought Jenny to her death, his reason, except in moments of self-injustice, was robust enough to put aside.

There are excuses that we owe to ourselves, and we have a right to expect justice even from our own consciences.  A sentimental conscience is the most tiresome of all altruists, and wilfully to indulge in remorse that we have not justly incurred is to blunt our consciences for real offences.  The best repentance for our sins is a clear-eyed recognition of their nature, and the temptation in some flurry of feeling to take on our shoulders the mistakes of destiny with which we chance to have been involuntarily associated, is one to be resisted in the interests of that self-knowledge which is the beginning of self-development.  Before we take the scourge in hand for our own shoulders let us be quite sure that we have sinned.

There were hours, particularly those hours of sudden wakefulness in the middle of the night when our minds lose their sense of proportion, in which Theophil agonised beyond endurance, and, as on that afternoon when he had found Jenny’s diary, said to himself with merciless reiteration, “She seems to have had a shock”—­“It was you who killed Jenny.”

These hours had to be supported as we support hours of purely physical pain.  The morning brought a saner, larger view.  The tragedy of Jenny’s death was not to be so easily explained.  In it were implicated more august responsible causes, it was part of a more general tragedy; as the original instinct to blame himself and Isabel was part of man’s ancient theological habit of making man the scapegoat of the universe.

But as the thought of Isabel thus became bearable once more, it became for that very reason a thought the more faithfully to be resisted.

It might become sweet.

It was sweet!

One day the casuistry of grief brought Theophil the reflection that, as Isabel was the only woman he knew whom Jenny had known too, and that as Jenny had loved her also, she was thus destined for him even by Jenny herself.  Besides, as he had realised no unfaithfulness to Jenny in his love for Isabel during Jenny’s life, there could equally be no unfaithfulness now that she was dead.  Moreover, if Jenny still in some mysterious way kept watch over his life, she would understand his heart as she could never have understood it when she was alive...

These thoughts brought deep sorrow to him for many days, during which once more he rebuked himself as “a base person,” but, curiously enough, in one who so despised the world and its opinion, it was an apparently superficial consideration that was the mainstay of his faithfulness, against these disloyal suggestions of a life that was thus reawakening in spite of himself.