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 changed, and where they seemed to have been sitting all the hours of those now quite disrespectfully forgotten months.
"Yes, but how real!" said Jenny.

It was Jenny who said "how real!" How fantastic, too, is the present! Sometimes, perhaps nearly always, it tortures us with the unreality, the unrealisability of precious moments that are flying, flying, and can never come again; and at other times it equally eludes us with a sense of their indestructibility.

To-night the present had chosen to seem real.