how to be found again, and how to be known again when found? Kingston passed insensibly beyond the cheap materialism of orthodoxy. He could not postulate an infinite gilded space where Isabel might be eternally walking in her habit as she had lived on earth. This invincible anthropomorphism, this obstinate survival of the savage in us, by which we are all prone to imagine the dead as we saw them in life, and familiar for ever by their earthly features, had now no hold on Kingston. He knew that, whenever we may meet our dead again, and wherever that may be, heart will call to heart, and soul be known again to soul; but the features that we have known and loved, the bones, the flesh, the softness, will all have passed long since into other forms of life, merged in the huge kaleidoscope of the universe. Perhaps, in circumstances less cogent, he might have conceived himself as meeting the physical Isabel years hence in some glorified state, yet recognisable to eyes that had known her on earth. The sight of her relics, however, jarred him once and for all out of the puny, materialistic dream. The blackened hideousness of them forced on his attention the irrelevance of all physical forms. For a time they may be everything, these forms and features; ultimately they go for nothing, pass utterly, are dropped, discarded, alike by the love that wore them and by the love that worshipped the spirit they clothed. No, he had done for ever with the corporeal Isabel. Weaknesses and beauties of shape were all destroyed, reduced to their native insignificance. Yet Isabel remained. But he had lost her; she had passed beyond his knowledge into dim places where, if ever she heard the cry of his soul far off, she could not make him any answer. Now and then, perhaps, she might call to him in return; in the whisper of the evening wind, in the song of a bird; but never again in the accents he had known, from the lips that he had watched; and, even so, she might call unceasingly to the hungering ears of his soul, yet never be able to make them understand whose voice it was that they heard. His deep certainty that she still lived made the separation more paradoxical, more horrible than ever to Kingston. To know that she was there, yet to call in vain; never to see her, never to meet her, to be unable, through all his days, to open up any means of communication with the thing he knew to be still existing,--this was the ghastliest instance of Fate’s irony, giving so much, yet making the gift so nugatory.