astating sort.... And now, for the
first time, I was really to behold her.... Could it be Theresa, after
all, this tangle of subdued turbulences? Let no one suppose that it is
an easy thing to bear, the relentlessly lucid understanding that I then
first exercised; or that, in its first enfranchisement, the timid vision
does not yearn for its old screens and mists.

Suddenly, as Theresa sat there, her head, filled with its tender
thoughts of me, held in her gentle hands, I felt Allan's step on the
carpeted stair outside. Theresa felt it, too,--but how? for it was not
audible. She gave a start, swept the black envelopes out of sight, and
pretended to be writing in a little book. Then I forgot to watch her any
longer in my absorption in Allan's coming. It was he, of course, that I
was awaiting. It was for him that I had made this first lonely,
frightened effort to return, to recover.... It was not that I had
supposed he would allow himself to recognize my presence, for I had long
been sufficiently familiar with his hard and fast denials of the
invisible. He was so reasonable always, so sane--so blindfolded. But I
had hoped that because of his very rejection of the ether that now
contained me I could perhaps all the more safely, the more secretly,
watch him, linger near him. He was near now, very near,--but why did
Theresa, sitting there in the room that had never belonged to her,
appropriate for herself his coming? It was so manifestly I who had
drawn him, I whom he had come to seek.

The door was ajar. He knocked softly at it "Are you there, Theresa?" he
called. He expected to find her, then, there in my room? I shrank back,
fearing, almost, to stay.

"I shall have finished in a moment," Theresa told him, and he sat down
to wait for her.

No spirit still unreleased can understand the pang that I felt with
Allan sitting almost within my touch. Almost irresistibly the wish beset
me to let him for an instant feel my nearness. Then I checked myself,
remembering--oh, absurd, piteous human fears!--that my too unguarded
closeness might alarm him. It was not so remote a time that I myself had
known them, those blind, uncouth timidities. I came, therefore, somewhat
nearer--but I did not touch him. I merely leaned toward him and with
incredible softness whispered his name. That much I could not have
forborne; the spell of life was still too strong in me.

But it gave him no comfort, no delight. "Theresa!" he called, in a voice