secret little bed-chamber, hung in blue and green, with
a ceiling of stars. They should climb it each night on a ladder of
moonlight, and slide down from it each morning on the first strong rays
of the sun. And sometimes if it frightened them with being too near
heaven, they would seek out a dell of fine moss and creep close together
into the arms of the kind earth-mother, and then sleep while the stars
kept watch.

O, yes, it would be a wonderful life together.

Then suddenly the child's play would cease, as the birds stop singing
with the coming of the stars, and silence would sweep over them again,
and a great kiss would leap out of the silence, like a flame that lights
up heaven from north to south, and they would hang together, lost in an
anguish of desire.

The setting sun was turning the wood into halls of strange light, and
spreading golden couches here and there in its deep recesses.

"Theophil..." sighed Isabel.

"Wife..." sighed Theophil--(ah! Jenny!) and then a voice that seemed to
be neither's, and yet seemed to be the voice of both,--a voice like a
dove smothered in sweetness between their breasts,--said, "Let us go
deeper into the wood."

Later, when the stars had come, two white faces came glimmering from the
innermost chancel of the wood's green darkness. They passed close
together, still as phantoms among the trees, and when they came out on
to the lane they stood still.

"Theophil," said one voice, "if I should be dying, and I should send for
you, will you promise me to come?"

"Isabel," said another voice, "if I should be dying, and I should send
for you, will you promise _me_ to come?"

And each voice vowed to the other, and said, "I would come, and I would
go with you."

And all these words had once been Jenny's, but they had been Isabel's
first.

CHAPTER XIX

PREPARATIONS FOR A FAST AND OTHER SADNESS

As the sharing of a cruel or unworthy secret must be the most terrible
of all human relationships, the sharing of a beautiful secret is the
most blest. Thus, for the week following this day of days, Theophil and
Isabel went about their daily lives with all heaven in their hearts,
and, divided though they were, possessed by a mystical certitude of
inner union which they felt no extension of space or endurance of time
could destroy.

Such a marriage as theirs is, of course, the dream of all separated
lovers, "the love that waited and in waiting died" the theme of many
poets