She alone spoke to the dead girl as though she were still really alive, as one speaking to the deaf whom only one voice can reach.
But Theophil was conscious in his wildest, most heartbroken, words that Jenny could not hear them.

He talked to her as though she were a picture of herself, and as one would implore a picture to answer us, he symbolised the cry of his soul in cries that he knew were vain.
Yet though Jenny were sculpture now, Theophil could not forget that this icy marble had once been the flesh he had loved.

O God! that little tender body, whose every part was sweetly joined together like the words of a song, it was marble now.
"Ah! Jenny, are you smiling to think of what you and I know, you and I, and no one else in the world?
Jenny, we shall never forget, never forget, shall we?
And you will not breathe our secrets even in heaven.
Do you really hear me, after all, but are forbidden to say?
Are you glad somewhere to see how I love you, and are you at this moment looking into my face wildly for a sign, as I into yours?
Is it I who seem dead, Jenny?
and are you beating wildly at the gates of life to win back to me, as I am beating at the gates of death?
But, Jenny, we shall find each other, _must_ find each other some day.

I shall be so true, Jenny,--will you be true to me in heaven ?" Then would sweep across his soul a pitiless vista of the long cold years that lay between him and Jenny.

He was not twenty-five; through what a weary pilgrimage of useless years must he journey on, before there was Jenny's face shining at the end.