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.

Death was coming very near now, so near that Jenny began to forget that
she was going to die. She forgot too that she was married to Theophil,
and would sometimes babble her heart-breaking fancies of the little home
that was so near now, till sometimes Theophil had to hurry away with his
unbearable grief to some other room.

And Jenny's once rosy apple of a face made one's heart ache to look on
now. It made one frightened, too: it was so dark and witchlike, so
uncanny, almost wicked, so thin and full of inky shadows. She would sit
up in her bed a wizened little goblin, and laugh a queer, dry, knowing
laugh to herself,--a laugh like the scraping of reeds in a solitary
place. A strange black weariness seemed to be crushing down her brows,
like the "unwilling sleep" of a strong narcotic. She would begin a
sentence and let it wither away unfinished, and point sadly and almost
humorously to her straight black hair, clammy as the feathers of a dead
bird lying in the rain. Her hearing was strangely keen. And yet she did
not know, w