awakened with a start.  Jenny was sitting up and bending over him.  With her dark hair hanging about her face, and in that light, there was something weird and unearthly about her, as though she were already dead and had risen in her shroud.  Something of a shiver went through him, as she put her thin arms round his neck and clutched him in a sudden agony of longing.  All the strength of her poor little body seemed to pass into that kiss, so eager, so convulsive.  “Jenny dear, it will make you so ill; lie down, little girl”—­and Jenny fell back on her pillow exhausted and coughing, and with eyes unearthly bright.

“Theophil,” she said suddenly, in that startling way sick people have, “you know that I am going to die!”

He could not answer, his voice would have choked in sobs.  He leaned his head close to Jenny and pressed her hand, and in spite of himself two great tears fell upon Jenny’s cheek.

But Jenny was curiously calm.  There was almost a note of scolding in her voice, as she said, “It’s no use crying, Theophil—­it’s got to be borne.”

She was already growing strangely wise, and a little removed from earth.  The first fears of her dark journey were passing, as she was more and more sinking among the shadows.  In moments there seemed to be something almost trivial in earthly grief.  But there was still one earthly joy, one earthly pride, of which her soul began to conceive the desire.  It had come with the thought of her grave that one day took her, less with fear, than of a new home to which she would presently be going.  In her fancy she had seen her name:  “Jenny Talbot, the beloved daughter of John and Jane Talbot, aged twenty-one years” and it had struck her that the name was wrong.

Talbot? that was not her name.  This was not the legend of her days.  The world would be all wrong about her if it only read that in after days.  No, her tomb could only bear one inscription—­and what sweetness amid all the bitterness of death there was to say it over and over again to herself:  “Jenny Londonderry, the beloved wife of Theophilus Londonderry, aged twenty-one years.”

Only twenty-one years—­she thought of those who would perhaps some day stand and read those words and think “What a sad little life!”—­and yet all that mattered of life had been lived in those short years, aye, in two of them, and the violet breath of young love would come up to those who read from her young grave, as it would never breathe from the earth of long-wed, late-dying lovers.

Perhaps it was a beautiful chance for love to end like theirs; their love had never grown old, so it would remain forever young, a spring sign, a star in the front of love’s year for ever.

Jenny spoke her wish to Theophil in the quiet of that night.  The wish had been in his heart too, and the wish was presently fulfilled.  Brides have seldom been happier than Jenny as she looked on the wife’s ring that hung loose on her thin finger, and brides have often been sadder.