in a total of vague impulses that they escape any individualisation.

In the very hour where all seemed lost to Jenny, Theophil's love for her
was passing in the fire of this ordeal from a love whose elements had
never, perhaps, quite combined, into that miraculous metal of true love,
which can never again be separated into anything but itself,--the true
gold of love which, in some magical second of projection, has suddenly
sprung out of those troubled ingredients of earth and iron, silver,
honey, and pearl.

This does not mean that Theophil's love for Isabel had grown any less
real, but that his love for Jenny had grown more real. For the first
time in its history it moved on the stage of the heroic. Up till now it
had lived secure, domestic days; there had been no danger to test its
truth, no lights of tragedy or romance thrown across it, it had seemed a
simple little earthborn love; whereas Theophil's love for Isabel had,
from its very conditions, walked from the first the high heaven
of dreams.

Isabel, indeed, still remained the heavenly love, but those who
understand will know the strength of Jenny when I say that she became
confirmed in this hour of trial as the household love of Theophil's
life. Isabel remained the Muse, but it was Jenny, after all, in spite of
those solemn words in the Wood of Silence, that was the wife; and if,
at first sound, there seems less of heaven in such a love, it is surely
only because when heaven has become incarnated upon earth we forget to
call it heaven.

In the few moments of silence which followed Jenny's words, it was some
such turmoil of feelings and thoughts, questionings and conclusions,