Suddenly she was clothed in glorious beauty from head to foot. From head to foot she was altogether splendid and desirable. Every inch of her called aloud for his worship. As the sooty kitchen-maid of the tale strips off her rags and stands revealed a King’s golden daughter, so now the accidents of Isabel’s disguise, the untidy hair, the shapeless clothes, all passed out of Kingston’s consciousness. Henceforth she stood far above such peddling criticism. The rules of his ordinary taste could never apply again to this recovered spirit out of the dead ages. She was his--his right, his property, his existence. She was altogether without fault or blemish, the completion of himself. ‘You are beautiful,’ he said in a low voice--‘you are beautiful, the real Isabel. I never guessed what beauty was. It is you, Isabel. It has always been you.’ Wonder at the miracle possessed him, tied his tongue, gave him the pathetic little blundering gestures of the blind--of one suddenly emerged from a lifetime’s black darkness into the blinding glare of daylight. ‘You have come to me at last,’ smiled Isabel. ‘I wondered when you would. You have been trying not to wake.’ ‘I have been holding my eyelids down,’ he answered. ‘I have been making myself blind. It has been hell; Isabel ... Isabel!’ ‘Yes,’ she replied--‘yes. You have been denying me ... you have been denying yourself. It is Peter’s crime. Of course it was hell. But now you have confessed the truth--the truth which was from the beginning.’ He stared at her--the man made perfect in full self-realization--at her, the woman, whole and entire in her reunion with himself. Soul imperiously cried to soul, and body to body. She had the unimaginable beauty of the thing created by its lover, loved by its creator. Every line and curve of her was perfected handiwork of his own rapture. The loveliness that he saw in her, his own heart, his own flaming fancy had planted there, had fashioned and worshipped as the lover always fashions the idol that he worships. ‘How is it,’ he said hoarsely--‘how is it you can be so beautiful, Isabel? You are not beautiful. My eyes know you are not beautiful. And yet my heart knows better. My heart knows there is nothing like your beauty--nothing like it, Isabel, anywhere in the world. My soul is twisted up in every part of you; there is something of me in every part of you. Your hair, your skin, your eyes--they are me, Isabel; I have given myself to make them. Can you understand it, Isabel? There isn’t an inch of you in which the sinews and the nerves of myself have not always been woven and twisted.’