Suddenly Barney himself had a curious impression.  The features of Richard Alger instead of his own seemed to look back at him from his own thoughts.  He dashed his hand across his face with an impatient, bewildered motion, as if he brushed away unseen cobwebs, and stood up.  “You have made—­” he began again; but Sylvia interrupted him with a weak cry.  “Set down here, set down here, jest a minute, if you don’t want to kill me!” she wailed out, and she clutched at his sleeve and pulled him down, and before he knew what she was doing had shrunk close to him, and laid her head on his shoulder.  She went on talking desperately in her weak voice—­strained shrill octaves above her ordinary tone.

“I’ve had this—­sofa ten years,” she said—­“ten years, Richard—­an’ you never set with me on it before, an’—­you’d been comin’—­here a long while before that came betwixt us last spring, Richard.  Ain’t you forgiven me yet?”

Barney made no reply.

“Can’t you put your arm around me jest once, Richard?” she went on.  “You ain’t never, an’ you’ve been comin’ here a long while.  I’ve had this sofa ten years.”

Barney put his arm around her, seemingly with no volition of his own.

“It’s six months to-day sence you came last,” Sylvia said—­“it’s six whole months; an’ when I see you goin’ past to-night, it didn’t seem as if I could bear it—­it didn’t seem as if I could bear it, Richard.”  Sylvia turned her pale profile closer to Barney’s breast and sobbed faintly.  “I’ve watched so long for you,” she sighed out; “all these months I’ve sat there at the window, strainin’ my eyes into the dark.  Oh, you don’t know, Richard, you won’t never know!”

Barney trembled with Sylvia’s sobs.  He sat with a serious shamefacedness, his arm around the poor bony waist, staring over the faded fair head, which had never lain on any lover’s breast except in dreams.  For the moment he could not stir; he had a feeling of horror, as if he saw his own double.  There was a subtle resemblance which lay deeper than the features between him and Richard Alger.  Sylvia saw it, and he saw his own self reflected as Richard Alger in that straining mental vision of hers which exceeded the spiritual one.

“Can’t you forgive me, an’—­come again the way—­you used to?” Sylvia panted out.  “I couldn’t get home before, that night, nohow.  I couldn’t, Richard—­’twas the night Charlotte an’ Barney fell out.  They had a dreadful time.  I had to stay there.  It wa’n’t my fault.  If Barney had come back, I could have got here in season; but poor Charlotte was settin’ out there all alone on the doorstep, an’ her father wouldn’t let her in, an’ Sarah took on so I had to stay.  I thought I should die when I got back an’ found out you’d been here an’ gone.  Ain’t you goin’ to forgive me, Richard?”

Barney suddenly removed his arm from Sylvia’s waist, pushed her clinging hands away, and stood up again.  “Now, Miss Crane,” he said, “I’ve got to tell you.  You’ve got to listen, and take it in.  I am not Richard Alger; I am Barney Thayer.”