Yet for this, Jenny, you will not grudge them their piteous reward.
Yours are all the years, Jenny. You will spare them one day out of all
the years. Think, Jenny, of the hours and hours and hours you and
Theophil have spent in careless happiness, and they--one almost laughs
to think of it--have just so far been granted four minutes. For four
minutes out of infinite time life has privileged them to be
alone together.

It will be far safer too. Otherwise you know not with what fearful flame
love will fill the chasms under ground, circling and seething in the
fiery darkness. Theophil loves you, but some day your home will suddenly
be rent from cope to base, unless his poor heart may speak, yea, babble
itself, just once in Isabel's ears.

A temptation had come to Theophil. At first he put it aside. Then
passion, wiser for once than reason, told him that it was a necessity,
and he knew that passion was right. A week of the fortnight had gone,
and Theophil remembered that Isabel would now be in the neighbourhood of
certain famous woods where in his boyhood he had often wandered, and he
remembered that she was to have the Monday quite free. That Monday they
should spend together in those enchanted woods. His secular business
often took him to towns thirty or forty miles away, and it was not
startling for him not to return till late at night. Thus Isabel and he
should steal their one day out of all the years.

So there went a note without one word of love in it to tell Isabel that
love was coming by the morning train; and so on that morning Isabel
stood waiting for love at that little wayside station, and presently,
with a mighty rushing sound of iron and brass, love came and stood very
quietly by her side, and looked into her eyes.