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.”

“Good heavens, child, I didn’t mean that!” He rose and stood looking about him.  “I know, of course, that you have your beliefs, and I respect them, but you know equally well that I have nothing of the sort!  So—­don’t let us conjure up anything inexplicable.”

I stayed impalpably, imponderably near him.  Wretched and bereft though I was, I could not have left him while he stood denying me.

“What I mean,” he went on, in his low, distinct voice, “is a special, an almost ominous sense of cold.  Upon my soul, Theresa,”—­he paused—­“if I were superstitious, if I were a woman, I should probably imagine it to seem—­a presence!”

He spoke the last word very faintly, but Theresa shrank from it nevertheless.

“Don’t say that, Allan!” she cried out.  “Don’t think it, I beg of you!  I’ve tried so hard myself not to think it—­and you must help me.  You know it is only perturbed, uneasy spirits that wander.  With her it is quite different.  She has always been so happy—­she must still be.”

I listened, stunned, to Theresa’s sweet dogmatism.  From what blind distances came her confident misapprehensions, how dense, both for her and for Allan, was the separating vapor!