she was already beginning to be different from us, already putting off our body-sweet mortality, and putting on the fearful garments of death, changing before our eyes from ruddy familiar humanity into a being of another element, an element we dread as the fish dreads the air.  Soon we should not be able to talk to her.  Soon she would have unlearnt all the sweet grammar of earth.  She was no longer Jenny, but a fearful symbol of mysteries at which the flesh crept.  She was going to die.

Have you never looked ahead towards some trial, some physical trial, maybe an operation?—­for perhaps the pains of the body are the keenest, after all—­those of the spirit are at least in some part metaphor.  You look forward with dread, yet it is at last over.  It is behind you.  And have you never thought that so it will be with death some day?  Poor little Jenny was to face the great operation.

Next time I saw her she was dead.  In our hateful English fashion, they had shut her up in a dark room, and we had to take candles to see her.  I shall never forget the moment when my eyes first rested on that awful snow-white sheet, so faintly indented by the fragile form beneath, lines very fragile, but oh! so hard and cold, like the indentations upon frozen snow; never forget my strange unaccountable terror when he on one side and I on the other turned down the icy sheet from her face.  But terror changed to awe and reverence, as her face came upon us with its sweet sphinx-like smile.  Lying there, with a little gold chain round her neck and a chrysanthemum in the bosom of her night-gown, there was a curious regality about her, a look as though she wore a crown our eyes were unable to see.  And while I gazed upon her, the sobs of my friend came across the bed, and as he called to her I seemed to hear the eternal Orpheus calling for his lost Eurydice.  Poor lad!—­poor maid!  Here, naked and terrible, was all the tragedy of the world compressed into an hour, the Medusa-face of life that turns the bravest to stone.  Surely, I felt, God owed more than He could ever repay to these two lovers, whom it had been so easy to leave to their simple joys.  And from that night to this I can never look upon my white bed without seeing afar off the moment when it, too, will bear the little figure of her I love best in the world, bound for her voyage to the Minotaur Death; just as I never put off my clothes at night, and stretch my limbs down among the cool sheets, without thinking of the night when I shall put off my clothes for the last time and close my eyes for ever.

LECTOR.  But, my friend, this is to feel too much; it is morbid.

SCRIPTOR.  Morbid!  How can one really feel and not be morbid?  If one be morbid, one can still be brave.

LECTOR.  But surely, true-lover as you are, it would be a joy to you to think that this terrible parting of death will not be final.  We cannot love so well without hoping that we may meet our loved ones somewhere after death.