“I am going away, Allan.  I have stayed to do everything that needed to be done.  Now your mother will be here to care for you, and it is time for me to go.”

He stared at her and stood still.  Theresa had been there so long, she so definitely, to his mind, belonged there.  And she was, as I also had jealously known, so lovely there, the small, dark, dainty creature, in the old hall, on the wide staircases, in the garden....  Life there without Theresa, even the intentionally remote, the perpetually renounced Theresa—­he had not dreamed of it, he could not, so suddenly, conceive of it.

“Sit here,” he said, and drew her down beside him on a bench, “and tell me what it means, why you are going.  Is it because of something that I have been—­have done?”

She hesitated.  I wondered if she would dare tell him.  She looked out and away from him, and he waited long for her to speak.

The pale stars were sliding into their places.  The whispering of the leaves was almost hushed.  All about them it was still and shadowy and sweet.  It was that wonderful moment when, for lack of a visible horizon, the not yet darkened world seems infinitely greater—­a moment when anything can happen, anything be believed in.  To me, watching, listening, hovering, there came a dreadful purpose and a dreadful courage.  Suppose for one moment, Theresa should not only feel, but see me—­would she dare to tell him then?

There came a brief space of terrible effort, all my fluttering, uncertain forces strained to the utmost.  The instant of my struggle was endlessly long and the transition seemed to take place outside me—­as one sitting in a train, motionless, sees the leagues of earth float by.  And then, in a bright, terrible flash I knew I had achieved it—­I had attained visibility.  Shuddering, insubstantial, but luminously apparent, I stood there before them.  And for the instant that I maintained the visible state I looked straight into Theresa’s soul.

She gave a cry.  And then, thing of silly, cruel impulses that I was, I saw what I had done.  The very thing that I wished to avert I had precipitated.  For Allan, in his sudden terror and pity, had bent and caught her in his arms.  For the first time they were together; and it was I who had brought them.

Then, to his whispered urging to tell the reason of her cry, Theresa said: 

“Frances was here.  You did not see her, standing there, under the lilacs, with no smile on her face?”

“My dear, my dear!” was all that Allan said.  I had so long now lived invisibly with them, he knew that she was right.

“I suppose you know what it means?” she asked him, calmly.

“Dear Theresa,” Allan said, slowly, “if you and I should go away somewhere, could we not evade all this ghostliness?  And will you come with me?”

“Distance would not banish her,” my sister confidently asserted.  And then she said, softly:  “Have you thought what a lonely, awesome thing it must be to be so newly dead?  Pity her, Allan.  We who are warm and alive should pity her.  She loves you still,—­that is the meaning of it all, you know—­and she wants us to understand that for that reason we must keep apart.  Oh, it was so plain in her white face as she stood there.  And you did not see her?”