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, you are alive! you are real! O Theophil, there is the little
scar on your forehead I've been longing to see."

"Yes! it is Isabel! She walks just as she did a thousand years ago. I am
carrying her rugs. How well I remember her umbrella!"

"How fantastic absence is!" said Isabel, as the three friends sat once
more that evening in the little study where nothing seemed to have