The hours which followed were among the most poignant that Laurence had ever experienced. He had made so certain that he needed but to open that door to regain the unreal world, yet world--as he believed--of profoundest reality, which enchanted, while it baffled and perplexed him. He found himself compelled to admit, moreover, not without a sense of humiliation, that his attitude was not exclusively pathological or scientific. A good deal of the natural man, and the natural man's affections and vanities, entered into it. He craved once again to see that slender, flitting figure, to feel the vibration of that otherwise impalpable hand, to read the trust and exquisite sympathy of those lovely eyes; he craved again to be aware of the fervour of his own eloquence, the rush and spring of his own thought. Moreover, he felt jealous, absurdly but increasingly jealous, of that other Laurence Rivers, of whom, for all his vitality and immediate consciousness of living energy and active will, he seemed to be but a second edition. The man had forestalled him in face and semblance, forestalled him too in the heart of the woman it would be--it was, he feared--only too easy for him to love. And so he wandered aimlessly, restlessly about the bright, empty room, almost as his sweet rose-clad lady had wandered on the night he first met her, searching, searching for some lost good; while, as time lengthened and his nerves grew strained by impatient waiting and want of sleep, fears that by his own action he had procured this disappointment began to assail him. He was always over-confident, blundering from too great self-belief. For might it not be that in opening her little treasure-chest, in touching those objects so dear to her dead fingers and dead eyes, in reading her letters--nay, in striving to approach her and establish relations with her at all--he had outraged her delicacy, had, in a sense, assaulted her soul, had been guilty of spiritual insult, as in grosser, material existence a man might assault or insult a woman's person? Had he, unwittingly, transgressed some law obtaining in the world of spirits, in the state of being which lies outside and beyond the Gates of Death, and of which human beings, bound by the conditions of their earthly environment, have as yet no cognisance?--Why should not the mind and heart be sublimated to as exquisite a fineness of texture, in her case, as the body had been? This idea of possible outrage, of unwitting grossness towards her, was horrible to Laurence. It stabbed him with shame, and provoked in him a passionate desire for absolution. If she would only come--only come, that he might implore her pardon, gain forgiveness, or--still better--receive comfortable assurance that he had not sinned!