But she still kept about, and whereas her old husband had grown sleepier as his end neared, she seemed to be growing more active again, fidgety and restless.  She slept badly, and returned to her old habit of being first down in the morning and lighting the kitchen fire, in spite of remonstrances.  Indeed, she might sometimes be heard up in the middle of the night, making herself a cup of tea in the kitchen.  The kitchen had been her world, and she was already beginning to haunt it.

There it was one wintry morning they found her sitting in the old arm-chair in which her husband had died, and then they recalled her words, for she had died on the very day she had predicted.

She knew nothing of books, this quaint old woman, and had a very antiquated taste in wall-papers; yet there would seem to be other ways of being wise, and it may indeed be held that books act too much as insulators between us and the earth, to the mysterious currents of which gnarled shapes of unlettered old men and women may be the more sensitive as lying closer to the Mother.

At all events, old Mrs. Talbot did seem to have won certain confidences from life and death refused to more consciously alert ears.  Hers had been that hearing beyond listening to which secrets are sometimes revealed.

Her death was more of a loss to her son-in-law than he might have conceived, for not only was she the last of Jenny’s flesh and blood, but she was the only one else in the world who missed Jenny as he missed her.  Others might, through sympathy, share his sorrow, but she and he were partners in an actual loss.  Something had definitely gone from each.  Jenny seemed to be twice dead with the death of her mother, and Theophil’s loneliness suddenly became more absolute and cut off than ever before.

There was now no one left who could involuntarily recall remembered words and traits of Jenny, and who would for their own sakes want to sit down and talk of her.  All that was left that really knew Jenny was the old house itself.  That remembered and talked of her still in its dumb way; and as he realised this, his mood once more changed.  He forgot his aspirations toward a broader world, and felt that, not only would it be a sort of unfaithfulness to leave Zion Place, but that to do so, and to break up this familiar harmony of home, this little cosmos of friendly furniture in accustomed relations,—­pictures hung so from time immemorial, rooms dedicated to this use and no other,—­would be to destroy the one mirror from which could come to him still glimpses of Jenny’s living face.  In just that look of the rooms was the best portrait he possessed of Jenny.

Though he had always been fond of Mr. Moggridge, it had not before occurred to Theophil to make of him a companion; but about this time, as Mr. Moggridge would drop in of an evening to discuss church matters, the young minister would be surprised to note how lonely he felt when he had gone.  Indeed Mr. Moggridge possessed that great undefinable gift of companionability.