There followed a period whose length I cannot measure and during which I was able to make no progress in the difficult, dizzying experience of release.  “Earth-bound” my jealousy relentlessly kept me.  Though my two dear ones had forsworn each other, I could not trust them, for theirs seemed to me an affectation of a more than mortal magnanimity.  Without a ghostly sentinel to prick them with sharp fears and recollections, who could believe that they would keep to it?  Of the efficacy of my own vigilance, so long as I might choose to exercise it, I could have no doubt, for I had by this time come to have a dreadful exultation in the new power that lived in me.  Repeated delicate experiment had taught me how a touch or a breath, a wish or a whisper, could control Allan’s acts, could keep him from Theresa.  I could manifest myself as palely, as transiently, as a thought.  I could produce the merest necessary flicker, like the shadow of a just-opened leaf, on his trembling, tortured consciousness.  And these unrealized perceptions of me he interpreted, as I had known that he would, as his soul’s inevitable penance.  He had come to believe that he had done evil in silently loving Theresa all these years, and it was my vengeance to allow him to believe this, to prod him ever to believe it afresh.

I am conscious that this frame of mind was not continuous in me.  For I remember, too, that when Allan and Theresa were safely apart and sufficiently miserable I loved them as dearly as I ever had, more dearly perhaps.  For it was impossible that I should not perceive, in my new emancipation, that they were, each of them, something more and greater than the two beings I had once ignorantly pictured them.  For years they had practiced a selflessness of which I could once scarcely have conceived, and which even now I could only admire without entering into its mystery.  While I had lived solely for myself, these two divine creatures had lived exquisitely for me.  They had granted me everything, themselves nothing.  For my undeserving sake their lives had been a constant torment of renunciation—­a torment they had not sought to alleviate by the exchange of a single glance of understanding.  There were even marvelous moments when, from the depths of my newly informed heart, I pitied them—­poor creatures, who, withheld from the infinite solaces that I had come to know, were still utterly within that

                            Shell of sense
    So frail, so piteously contrived for pain.

Within it, yes; yet exercising qualities that so sublimely transcended it.  Yet the shy, hesitating compassion that thus had birth in me was far from being able to defeat the earlier, earthlier emotion.  The two, I recognized, were in a sort of conflict; and I, regarding it, assumed that the conflict would never end; that for years, as Allan and Theresa reckoned time, I should be obliged to withhold myself from the great spaces and linger suffering, grudging, shamed, where they lingered.