Yet for quite simple reasons, as this mysterious world goes, it had been decided that Theophil was for as brief a while as possible, allowing for the leisure of natural causes, to support the life he thought he hated.  Even while Jenny lived, fate, mercifully foreseeing, had willed him a brief pilgrimage; for on that night when Jenny had leaned over him with that terrible hunger of damp breath, it had been written that of that kiss Theophil should some day die.

And it was of that kiss that the following May Theophil, all his plans laid aside, engagements cancelled on every hand, eager life suddenly trapped in this choking cul-de-sac, was dying.

Death!  It was an outrage!  He was young, he was powerful!  He would not die!

There was May at the window.  He too was full of May.  He would get up and go about his work.  He knew he could if they would only let him.  It was the mere rebellion of unspent energies that craved to be used, like the muscular vivacity of suddenly severed limbs that still toss and twitch with hot life; yet it inspired Theophil one afternoon when he had been a fortnight or so in bed, during a brief absence of his nurse, to rise and dress, and as by a miracle keep an appointment to speak at a neighbouring town, where he had been promised for a great agitation on the Home Rule Question.  Surely it was a strange enough contradiction of a year ago, when such meetings had seemed such trivialities in the thought of death.  Now, when they said he was dying—­had this world grown suddenly so significant that he could rise from his death-bed to make one last appearance in the paltry lists?

He spoke with an overcoat buttoned up to his throat, and a tumbler of port wine at his side; and as the audience looked on his white hollow face, and listened to his terrible eloquence, they realised with a shudder that this was the last tragic effort of a dying man.

Alas! the great world was not to be stamped with his image and superscription, after all; and only a little faithful company of friends would know that Theophilus Londonderry was a great man.

This escapade, though it brought on death with double swiftness, brought too a calm of satisfaction which made it easier to die; and in the revulsion which it set up, life once more shrank into the background, and its little triumphs grew paltry once more.  Strange, he half smiled to himself, that the man who was at last really going to Jenny should even momentarily care about doing anything else!

Yes, he was going to Jenny!  So soon!  Soon he would be on the other side of that wall, soon be travelling that strange highway, on the other side of light and darkness.  In a few more weeks he... HE? Would there still be he anywhere in the universe?

Jenny!  Perhaps there had been no Jenny all these months.  Perhaps Jenny stopped being Jenny forever in that last moment when she had tried to wish him good-bye.  And all his daily consciousness of her presence, all the fancies of his faithful heart, had been idle as the words of a man talking in his sleep.  Those little offerings he had brought to her altar,—­she had never seen them; for perhaps Jenny had been an idol he had made out of air, while he had been her lonely and unheeded worshipper.