When Kingston Darnley woke, the clouds had broken. Overhead was the clear vault of stars; beneath, a vast flocculent sea of milky whiteness. Already the eastern air was lightening with the first green tremors of dawn, and the warm calm of the night was giving place to the keen freshness of a new day. Kingston could rest no longer. He rose, and wandered to and fro across the summit, thinking out the situation in which he had become involved. A force too great for his resistance had swept him into its dominion; so much was certain. The force was hateful, paradoxical, inexplicable. But its grip was at his throat, and no struggles could extricate him. The whole face of the world had suddenly changed; hidden things had been made clear, and things which had once been thought precious and sufficient were now shown in the light of this strange sunrise to be altogether false and valueless. No reluctance, no blinking of facts, no well-meant pretences, could alter the fact that life had suddenly opened out before him, enormous, passionate, in all its scope, and that, in the revelation the mountains of bygone days were dwarfed to molehills. But these changes ruled only in the secret places of the heart. There remained the practical aspect of things. In the depths of his soul he now carried with him a knowledge of what was highest and most glorious in life, but that knowledge must for ever be buried in the depths. His own rash action, in the days before he had understood, before he had been awaked, had put it eternally beyond his power to stretch out his hands openly, and seize the happiness that his soul had found. Chains of diamond might bind him now and for ever to this second self that he had discovered; but chains of his own making, of his own riveting, made him prisoner to another life, in the lower world of daily existence. In the clear cold of the dawn the heats and tempests of his brain seemed to grow calm; he saw more and more clearly into the future and its possibilities; passion and its stress had given way to a cooler appraisement of circumstances. His nature, emotional rather than sensual, helped him to regain his balance. It was on the spiritual, transcendental side of his feelings that he dwelt.