endlessly long and the transition seemed to take place outside me--as
one sitting in a train, motionless, sees the leagues of earth float by.
And then, in a bright, terrible flash I knew I had achieved it--I had
_attained visibility_. Shuddering, insubstantial, but luminously
apparent, I stood there before them. And for the instant that I
maintained the visible state I looked straight into Theresa's soul.

She gave a cry. And then, thing of silly, cruel impulses that I was, I
saw what I had done. The very thing that I wished to avert I had
precipitated. For Allan, in his sudden terror and pity, had bent and
caught her in his arms. For the first time they were together; and it
was I who had brought them.

Then, to his whispered urging to tell the reason of her cry, Theresa
said:

"Frances was here. You did not see her, standing there, under the
lilacs, with no smile on her face?"

"My dear, my dear!" was all that Allan said. I had so long now lived
invisibly with them, he knew that she was right.

"I suppose you know what it means?" she asked him, calmly.

"Dear Theresa," Allan said, slowly, "if you and I should go away
somewhere, could we not evade all this ghostliness? And will you come
with me?"

"Distance would not banish her," my sister confidently asserted. And
then she said, softly: "Have you thought what a lonely, awesome thing it
must be to be so newly dead? Pity her, Allan. We who are warm and alive
should pity her. She loves you still,--that is the meaning of it all,
you know--and she wants us to understand that for that reason we must
keep apart. Oh, it was so plain in her white face as she stood there.
And you did not see her?"

"It was your face that I saw," Allan solemnly told her--oh, how
different he had grown from the Allan that I had known!--"and yours is
the only face that I shall ever see." And again he drew her to him.

She sprang from him. "You are defying her, Allan!" she cried. "And you
must not. It is her right to keep us apart, if she wishes. It must be as
she insists. I shall go, as I told you. And, Allan, I beg of you, leave
me the courage to do as she demands!"

They stood facing each other in the deep dusk, and the wounds that I had
dealt them gaped red and accusing. "We must pity her," Theresa had said.
And as I remembered that extraordinary speech, and saw the agony in her
face, and the greater agony in Allan's, there came the great irreparable
cleavage between mortality and m