THE TRYST LETHEAN Jenny had gone into the darkness, and she had gone alone.

Theophil had not gone with her.
That he had remained behind meant certainly no selfish clinging to life, and indeed there was a sense, as was presently to appear, in which very really he had kept young love's old promise and died with Jenny.

That he had not literally fulfilled it was due to those physical conditions of dying of which in the hour of that promise young love is happily ignorant; for the promise is usually made in moments of keenly conscious physical life.

Dying together is then figured, perhaps, as climbing hand in hand the radiant topmost peak of life, with a last splendid leap together into some immortal morning; and such a marriage in death, a last union of two lives in some fiery consummation of dying, has been the lot of some lovers supremely blest.
Some indeed there are whose last earthly moment is a vivid reassertion of the glory and loveliness of life.

They drink the great cup to its last golden drain, and by their death-beds we seem to be standing at the laughing founts of being.