not gone with her.

That he had remained behind meant certainly no selfish clinging to life,
and indeed there was a sense, as was presently to appear, in which very
really he had kept young love's old promise and died with Jenny. That he
had not literally fulfilled it was due to those physical conditions of
dying of which in the hour of that promise young love is happily
ignorant; for the promise is usually made in moments of keenly conscious
physical life. Dying together is then figured, perhaps, as climbing hand
in hand the radiant topmost peak of life, with a last splendid leap
together into some immortal morning; and such a marriage in death, a
last union of two lives in some fiery consummation of dying, has been
the lot of some lovers supremely blest.

Some indeed there are whose last earthly moment is a vivid reassertion
of the glory and loveliness of life. They drink the great cup to its
last golden drain, and by their death-beds we seem to be standing at the
laughing founts of being. They are radiant, victorious, even witty, to
the last, when at one swoop of blackness they are extinguished like a
light plunged into a stream.

But for others the cold mists that hang low by Lethe's banks have
already brought forgetfulness before their feet grow icy with the first
step into the dark water. To meet on Lethe-side is to meet, maybe; but
with a sad unrecognising meeting. To lie together in oblivion, with
sightless eyes, and dulled hearts and listless hands,--that was not
love's meaning.

And not only are the dying thus drugged out of knowledge before they
die, but those who stand near them grow drowsed, too, by the fumes of