She stood gazing at him, her eyes, her pose, her manner inspired with conquest. The blank, sickening ferocity of passion seized him as he answered her look. It caught him by the throat, swept him away in a rapture of agony. To crush that beauty of hers, to mangle it, strangle it, absorb it utterly in himself, became at once the one blinding, obliterating need that filled his whole consciousness. An insatiable thirst of her loveliness possessed him. The keen, flame-like delirium of his desire was a devastating pain. His whole being moaned with the aching torment of it. The sight of her, the thought of her, went through him, pierced him, rent his innermost heart in twain. The drunken glory of suffering that held him on the wheel of knives was a frenzy very different from that placid repletion which had been his ideal--how long ago?--of the great ideal passion. Now at last he knew what passion was--the parching, gorgeous misery of it, the straining, leaping martyrdom. The ancient secret madness that once had dwelt in the orderly rooms of his father’s heart now stirred again in the son’s, and bled once more, under the wounds of ecstasy, as once, for a wild hour, it had bled long since at the hands of that ill-fated, forgotten woman whose place was now usurped by Isabel. Kingston, his calmer self destroyed by the red intoxication, moved towards his fate, vaguely, blindly. ‘Isabel--Isabel!’ he murmured with dry, cracking lips, groping hands outstretched to take her. And Isabel welcomed his coming as the crown of life. She threw his arms wide and waited, glowing and transfigured. The ghostly twilight of the mist was round her, behind her. The face it revealed was fierce with joy, exquisite in its vividness. The dark hair drifted round it, and the throat rose vivid and white from the low-cut collar of her dress, thrown back splendidly, an ivory column. The neck of her dress was fastened awry by a little brooch, whose diamonds gleamed dully in the pale glooming. And in an instant the man’s flaming drunkenness had passed--passed utterly, in a spasm of torment almost beyond his bearing. As sometimes we are torn painfully, violently from the gay madness of a happy dream by the sound of a bell or some other noise that penetrates to our consciousness from the outer world beyond our vision, so now, in the crisis of his passion, the sight of his wife’s brooch at Isabel’s throat recalled Kingston Darnley, with a jarring crash, to the horrible realities of life. Isabel, characteristically buttonless and pinless, had borrowed it from Gundred to make good the deficiencies of her blouse. His arms fell, the light of his eyes grew dull, and died. His body stood motionless, and his spirit went down into the abyss of hell. Isabel saw the change, and at the sight her own glory sympathetically faded. They had done with the heights. Now their feet were set on earth again.