Of a sudden he found himself mature, a calm master of his gifts.
Yet those who sat near him at those meetings might have noticed that as he sat down, pale amid plaudits, and crossed his hands upon his knees, and while his political colleagues were complimenting him to the audience on the mellow thunder of his political oratory, he was smiling furtively to himself.

"It's all very funny, isn't it, Jenny ?" he was saying in his heart.
Indeed it was hardly recognisable to himself as a fancy that whenever he spoke Jenny was somewhere in the audience.

Sometimes a remote face might bear a chance resemblance to her, and he would humour himself with the thought that that was Jenny.

For, with that self-consciousness which no modern mind can escape, he found a certain sad pleasure sometimes in noting the tricks grief played with him, loving and encouraging all its fancies--if fancies indeed they were.
When at other times he tried to think clearly, to strip himself of the illusions, as others would no doubt call them, in which he now lived, his thinking rather confirmed than dispersed them; and the more he pondered, the more he failed to realise that Jenny was dead, the surer became his consciousness that she was nearer to him (a very part of him as it were) than she had ever been in the days when others could still hear her voice and note her presence in a room.

Her very death had given him a paradoxical certitude of her immortality.
Yet this recognition of her presence, on some plane of spiritual apprehension, was none the less consistent with a piercing sense of her loss on the plane where love once moved in visible beauty.