Allan frowned.  “Don’t take me literally, Theresa,” he explained; and I, who a moment before had almost touched him, now held myself aloof and heard him with a strange untried pity, new born in me.  “I’m not speaking of what you call—­spirits.  It’s something much more terrible.”  He allowed his head to sink heavily on his chest.  “If I did not positively know that I had never done her any harm, I should suppose myself to be suffering from guilt, from remorse....  Theresa, you know better than I, perhaps.  Was she content, always?  Did she believe in me?”

“Believe in you?—­when she knew you to be so good!—­when you adored her!”

“She thought that?  She said it?  Then what in Heaven’s name ails me?—­unless it is all as you believe, Theresa, and she knows now what she didn’t know then, poor dear, and minds——­”

“Minds what?  What do you mean, Allan?”

I, who with my perhaps illegitimate advantage saw so clear, knew that he had not meant to tell her:  I did him that justice, even in my first jealousy.  If I had not tortured him so by clinging near him, he would not have told her.  But the moment came, and overflowed, and he did tell her—­passionate, tumultuous story that it was.  During all our life together, Allan’s and mine, he had spared me, had kept me wrapped in the white cloak of an unblemished loyalty.  But it would have been kinder, I now bitterly thought, if, like many husbands, he had years ago found for the story he now poured forth some clandestine listener; I should not have known.  But he was faithful and good, and so he waited till I, mute and chained, was there to hear him.  So well did I know him, as I thought, so thoroughly had he once been mine, that I saw it in his eyes, heard it in his voice, before the words came.  And yet, when it came, it lashed me with the whips of an unbearable humiliation.  For I, his wife, had not known how greatly he could love.

And that Theresa, soft little traitor, should, in her still way, have cared too!  Where was the iron in her, I moaned within my stricken spirit, where the steadfastness?  From the moment he bade her, she turned her soft little petals up to him—­and my last delusion was spent.  It was intolerable; and none the less so that in another moment she had, prompted by some belated thought of me, renounced him.  Allan was hers, yet she put him from her; and it was my part to watch them both.

Then in the anguish of it all I remembered, awkward, untutored spirit that I was, that I now had the Great Recourse.  Whatever human things were unbearable, I had no need to bear.  I ceased, therefore, to make the effort that kept me with them.  The pitiless poignancy was dulled, the sounds and the light ceased, the lovers faded from me, and again I was mercifully drawn into the dim, infinite spaces.

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