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 dreadful with alarm--and in that instant the last veil fell, and desperately, scarce believingly, I beheld how it stood between them, those two. She turned to him that gentle look of hers. "Forgive me," came from him hoarsely. "But I had suddenly the most--unaccountable sensation. Can there be too many windows open? There is such a--chill--about." "There are no windows open," Theresa assured him. "I took care to shut out the chill. You are not well, Allan!" "Perhaps not." He embraced the suggestion. "And yet I feel no illness apart from this abominable sensation that persists--persists.... Theresa, you must tell me: do I fancy it, or do you, too, feel--something--strange here?" "Oh, there is something very strange here," she half sobbed. "There always will be."