"O my Jenny! I would rather have died than this." "Yes, I think you would, dear. But you must not be too sad. Life is terrible,--like this. I understand it now. I know it was not you, or Isabel, or me. It was just fate--and we must try and help each other. Don't think I have been only sorry for myself. Don't think that of me. But I think you should have trusted me, dear." "We longed to tell you," said Theophil, with his head bowed in distress in Jenny's lap, while she softly stroked his hair with an absent tenderness, though her eyes looked straight in front of her, and her voice was as if she were talking to herself. "We longed to tell you," he repeated. "O I wish you had." "We feared it, dear." "Yes, yes, I know. I was only a little child the day before yesterday. I have never been worthy to be your wife, dear. I have known it all the time. I should never have taken your love. It has never been mine...." "But ..." she continued, "I will give it all back now. It is not too late. I have kept it pure ... for Isabel. I can give it to her, darling, with a kind heart--for she is worthy. She was born for you, dear. We were not born for each other, after all--were we, dear? I am the woman of that poem, not Isabel. It is I who must say good-bye. I can do it. I am a woman now, love--not a little child any more. 'Look in my face and see.'" The tangle of Theophil's emotions and thoughts, as he listened to Jenny in silence, was a revelation to him of the strange heart of love, and of the insufficiency of those formulas by which we image ourselves to ourselves. How little we know of ourselves till we are tested by the powerful reagents of love and danger, and in how many ways must those tests be applied before we learn anything of the elements of which we are composed! One love will reveal to us one side of our natures and its needs, another will reveal to us another with its needs; and till we grow old we can never be certain that there are not other sides to us that have never been illuminated, other needs that have never been awakened, by an emotion. A man may love two women equally: the woman he most needs and the woman who needs him most,--and in a crisis of choice he will probably choose the latter. Again, the power of the woman we have loved first has wonderful reserves to draw upon, humble pawns of feelings, memories, associations, not so brilliant to the imagination as the royalties of romance and sentiment on the other side, but incalculably useful in a battle. Too humble are some of these to gain acknowledgment; indeed they are often so submerged in a total of vague impulses that they escape any individualisation.