nd he found himself longing sometimes for some
woman on whose shoulder he might lean his head and weep out his grief
for Jenny! He loved death because Jenny had died; was he to love women
because Jenny had been a woman? Perhaps his feet had wandered in
dangerous paths at this time, had it not been for the restrictions which
his calling laid upon him.

These, however, did not deny him the theatre, which it had been part of
his programme at New Zion to advocate, though there was seldom anything
worth seeing at Coalchester Theatre Royal. Yet sometimes a good London
company would call there on its provincial progress, and it chanced one
day, looking into a shop window, that Theophil caught sight of a
photograph of a woman that startled him with its remarkable resemblance
to Jenny. It was the prima donna of a Gaiety burlesque. Such was the
strange shape Jenny had for the moment taken!

For the first time after her death Theophil was at the theatre that
evening. The bright lights and the music pierced him as with swords.
Once more he saw that apple-tree thick with blossom in the hot sun. Yet
his fancy found grim spells to lay the insolent ghost of life, and death
ever at his side whispered that all this light and music and dancing was
for but a little while; that those gay rouged faces, so confident in
laughing beauty, and all those nimble shapes, were to the eye that had
looked beyond life already stark in their coffins, with chin-cloths
about their nerveless jaws. Surely the lover would trip in the shroud
that was plainly to be seen from his feet to his lips!

Like sudden snow on a summer meadow, a white silence fell from his
imagination across that fiddling, jigging, gleaming atmosphere, and
everywhere the dead sat around him, watching in a trance strange antics
of the grimacing dead. Curiously, in these moods, he never thought of
himself as dead. Alas! life was too cruel to release him so soon to
death and Jenny.

Suddenly the theatre sprang back to life again with the entrance of the
prima donna. Yes, the resemblance was even greater than in the
photograph. She was a little taller and more heavily built than Jenny,
and it was not Jenny's voice; but for the rest, she _was_ Jenny. The
fascination of watching her was terrible. It seemed impossible that one
form could so mockingly resemble another, and yet be so hopelessly
someone else. Theophil could hardly bring himself to believe that the
woman yonder with Jenny's eye