ence of
release. "Earth-bound" my jealousy relentlessly kept me. Though my two
dear ones had forsworn each other, I could not trust them, for theirs
seemed to me an affectation of a more than mortal magnanimity. Without a
ghostly sentinel to prick them with sharp fears and recollections, who
could believe that they would keep to it? Of the efficacy of my own
vigilance, so long as I might choose to exercise it, I could have no
doubt, for I had by this time come to have a dreadful exultation in the
new power that lived in me. Repeated delicate experiment had taught me
how a touch or a breath, a wish or a whisper, could control Allan's
acts, could keep him from Theresa. I could manifest myself as palely, as
transiently, as a thought. I could produce the merest necessary flicker,
like the shadow of a just-opened leaf, on his trembling, tortured
consciousness. And these unrealized perceptions of me he interpreted, as
I had known that he would, as his soul's inevitable penance. He had come
to believe that he had done evil in silently loving Theresa all these
years, and it was my vengeance to allow him to believe this, to prod
him ever to believe it afresh.

I am conscious that this frame of mind was not continuous in me. For I
remember, too, that when Allan and Theresa were safely apart and
sufficiently miserable I loved them as dearly as I ever had, more dearly
perhaps. For it was impossible that I should not perceive, in my new
emancipation, that they were, each of them, something more and greater
than the two beings I had once ignorantly pictured them. For years they
had practiced a selflessness of which I could once scarcely have
conceived, and which even now I could only admire without entering into
its mystery. While I had lived solely for myself, these two divine
creatures had lived exquisitely for me. They had granted me everything,
themselves nothing. For my undeserving sake their lives had been a
constant torment of renunciation--a torment they had not sought to
alleviate by the exchange of a single glance of understanding. There
were even marvelous moments when, from the depths of my newly informed
heart, I pitied them--poor creatures, who, withheld from the infinite
solaces that I had come to know, were still utterly within that

Shell of sense
So frail, so piteously contrived for pain.

Within it, yes; yet exercising qualities that so sublimely transcended
it. Yet the shy, hesit