of news you would not expect her to have told. I have said
that women are both executioners of the tiresome. In this Isabel, I
fear, was no exception to her sex. Like most independent girls in
London, she had a little theatre-guard of devoted men friends, who took
it in turn to companion her to plays or picture-galleries; and these,
with admirable tact, she contrived to keep in, to them, the
unsatisfactory relation of brothers. One of these, however, had of late
been growing dangerously unfraternal. His presents had been growing
expensive. Cigarettes and chocolates, and pretty editions, like gloves,
and boxes of flowers, are every pretty woman's lawful spoils; but
costlier gifts are to be looked on with suspicion. Besides, the doomed
man's letters had been growing warmer. Indeed, Isabel remembered with
something like a shudder, so soon as she was back in her little room,
with its curious pictures and its general sense of exotic refinement,
that she had allowed him to kiss her the last time they had been
together. The reminiscence decided her. Theophil could never be hers;
but at least no facile or mediocre attachments should fill his place. So
at once there is posted a letter, as kind as cruelty can make it, and
with it go a little ormolu clock, a pair of mother-of-pearl
opera-glasses, a lovely fan it was hard, Isabel, to part with,--and
there is an end of that.

"Not after Theophil!" she sighed, as she took up her great Persian cat,
and, like it, sat gazing into the fire that flickered dreamily among her
fantastic possessions,--a mystery gazing idly into a mystery.

CHAPTER XVII

"O THAT 'T WERE POSSIBLE ..."

Well, the months have at last gone by,--dark solid bodies of absence,
not a day mercifully lost count of by the old calendar-maker, not an
hour of the long sentence remitted for a brave patience in the waiting.
They are reckoning by weeks at last, and now, excitedly, by days,
breathlessly now by little fast-dispersing hours.

The blackness that filled the world was a month ago streaked with gray;
three weeks ago there was a line of faint colour in the east; a
fortnight, and there are scarlet plumes in the far heaven, and a faint
twitter of song; a week, and the whole sky is a commotion of glory
and birds.

To meet again! O to meet again, just to look at each other again! We are
philosophers, we are brave, we shall remember Jenny, but O! the rapture
of just beholding each other again.

"Thank God