Then he sat down to write to her.  What a tidy, methodical little desk!  Everything in its place.  Dear, business-like, sea-witch Isabel!  Here was her engagement book.  He mustn’t begin reading her letters!

After his first disappointment, he was half-glad he would have to wait till to-morrow to see her,—­for, of course, he would wait.  To have thus sat in her room was almost enough for a first meeting.  It was like stealing upon her while she slept.

Then he began a letter; but as he wrote, who was this suddenly standing at his side?  Was it Isabel?  No...it was a little sobbing body quite near to his, crying as if its heart would break...

Oh, Jenny, Jenny—­God forgive me!

The spell was broken, the fit was over.  Theophil left no letter for Isabel, and no message, and the same evening he was once more back in his little study in Zion Place, wild with remorse.  O for the scourge and the fire!  But what penance shall avail to ease that poor little creature’s broken-hearted crying?

“She seems to have had a shock!—­She seems to have had a shock!”

CHAPTER XXVIII

BACK IN ZION PLACE

The shame of that wild unfaithfulness burned in Theophil’s soul for many days.  It humiliated him like a physical degradation.  To have been so drunkenly untrue!  It was one of those shocks to the moral nature from which it never quite recovers, and Theophil’s face lost some of its steadfastness, his walk some of its firmness, for this perfidy towards Jenny.

There was only one way to make the sense of it endurable, and he threw himself into his work with a wasting vehemence.  Where was his ambition?  There was so much yet to do.  New Zion had long since moved and hummed, and whizzed, the neighbouring towns had in a measure begun to dance to his piping, but it must be a long while yet ere his name was to London and to the world what it was already to Coalchester,—­that mere microcosm of his fame.

And till London knew him as well as Coalchester, there was no real monument to Jenny.  London—­no longer the city of Isabel—­must learn to say “Theophilus Londonderry” so naturally, that it would some day serve as an unforgettable remembrance of Jenny.  He must become a great man, because a great name is the one shrine in which love’s memory may escape oblivion.  In the arms of his name Jenny would then be carried down the years, one woman-star saved from the night of death.  Again, the world, for which in one way he had so little care, was to help him indirectly to keep his troth to Jenny.

In a sense, the mountain was already coming to this young prophet; for with the winter some of London’s finest spirits were now and again to be met in that incongruous Zion Place, as visiting lecturers to New Zion.  And each one, as he came, was impressed as Isabel had been on that old evening when she had discovered her colony of surprise-people.  Each realised in that gravely masterful young minister a power and a force of attraction which could not long remain hidden in that little country town.  Meanwhile, their visits enabled him to test his own calibre by comparison with theirs, and to realise that his instincts had not befooled him, but that he too had been called to the stage of the great world.