table,
familiar things that my earthly life had been passed among. Incredibly
distant from it all as I essentially was. I noted sharply that the very
gaps that I myself had left in my bookshelves still stood unfilled; that
the delicate fingers of the ferns that I had tended were still stretched
futilely toward the light; that the soft agreeable chuckle of my own
little clock, like some elderly woman with whom conversation has become
automatic, was undiminished.

Unchanged--or so it seemed at first. But there were certain trivial
differences that shortly smote me. The windows were closed too tightly;
for I had always kept the house very cool, although I had known that
Theresa preferred warm rooms. And my work-basket was in disorder; it was
preposterous that so small a thing should hurt me so. Then, for this was
my first experience of the shadow-folded transition, the odd alteration
of my emotions bewildered me. For at one moment the place seemed so
humanly familiar, so distinctly my own proper envelope, that for love of
it I could have laid my cheek against the wall; while in the next I was
miserably conscious of strange new shrillnesses. How could they be
endured--and had I ever endured them?--those harsh influences that I now
perceived at the window; light and color so blinding that they obscured
the form of the wind, tumult so discordant that one could scarcely hear
the roses open in the garden below?

But Theresa did not seem to mind any of these things. Disorder, it is
true, the dear child had never minded. She was sitting all this time at
my desk--at _my_ desk--occupied, I could only too easily surmise how. In
the light of my own habits of precision it was plain that that sombre
correspondence should have been attended to before; but I believe that I
did not really reproach Theresa, for I knew that her notes, when she did
write them, were perhaps less perfunctory than mine. She finished the
last one as I watched her, and added it to the heap of black-bordered
envelopes that lay on the desk. Poor girl! I saw now that they had cost
her tears. Yet, living beside her day after day, year after year, I had
never discovered what deep tenderness my sister possessed. Toward each
other it had been our habit to display only a temperate affection, and I
remember having always thought it distinctly fortunate for Theresa,
since she was denied my happiness, that she could live so easily and
pleasantly without emotions of the dev