"So soon as that! Is it so soon as that?" she sighed.
Happy Jenny!
CHAPTER XIII
IN WHICH JENNY KISSES MR. MOGGRIDGE
Isabel was leaving very early next morning for London, so good-byes must be brief. Jenny and Theophil saw her off at the station, but before leaving Zion Place there had been a moment in which for the second time in their lives she and Theophil had been alone.
They had stood together in the little study and taken each other's hands, without a word, and they had looked into each other's faces as those look whom a look must last a long time.
They didn't even say good-bye, for, if they were never to meet again, the look was not good-bye. And meet again it was not unlikely they would, for it had been already arranged that Isabel was to lead off the autumn entertainments; but the look did not mean that, either. As life had been planned for them, all subsequent meetings must be merely trivialities. They had met once, and fate had decided that they must never meet like that again. In that long look each knew that they met and parted for ever, autumn arrangements notwithstanding.
Each came out of that look as out of a great cathedral, and from that moment till the train left Theophil, with an unwonted sense of loneliness, by Jenny's side, they entered that cathedral no more. Their devotions were done for that day, and they must resume their secular duties, rippling idly over the great deeps of themselves.
One always leaves a station from which a dear friend has just gone with a certain subdued air, a certain bereaved hush in the voice, and even Jenny felt a momentary loneliness too. But it was not long before the doors of home opened again for her in the sound of Theophil's voice; and in the sense of the old familiar nearness to him she was back again safe in the only world she ever wished to dwell in.