tried and tender intercourse in their very touch. Their eyes held a past
in them as well as a future. There was no hurry of the emotions now, no
reason for haste in the seeking and giving of tenderness, no need to
snatch and clutch the good gifts of love as though there was but a short
day for the giving. Their love had grown conscious of its eternity.

It held but one lasting sadness,--that it might not be revealed to
Jenny. So little did they regard their love as one essentially for
concealment, that the temptation to include Jenny in their bond was at
moments a danger. It was so beautiful, and actually, though
unconsciously, she was so integral a part of its beauty.

Theirs was that dream of a threefold union, in which, so to say,
jealousy shall be so taken into the confidence of, so held to the heart
of, love, that it shall transform itself into love too; and, from being
the lonely tragic third, become, as the other two, one of an indivisible
trinity. Such unions of natures of especial grace have been born under
like conditions of fated intercourse, and they have been unions of a
strange beauty, the more blest by the sense of a conquest over love's
one unworthiness, its egoism. As the _égoisme à deux_ is finer than an
egoism of one, so this _égoisme à trois_, if you will, is again finer by
its additional inclusiveness.

Perhaps it had proved wiser in the end to yield to this temptation too.
But the tragic risk was one to dismay experiment. The strength of such a
union is literally the strength of its weakest link. Jenny loved both
Isabel and Theophil, and both Isabel and Theophil loved Jenny; and in
the love of the two girls, there was an element of affection that was
more impassioned than friendship. Jenny indeed loved Isabel so much that
it might well have proved that her love, with nothing but gladness,