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 devastating 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.