Kingston began to feel that, after all, the bill sent in by the gods had fallen more heavily on him than even on Isabel. Isabel had passed through agony to glory. But he, he had another agony, longer and more incurable than hers, though less poignant; and no glory to compensate, at the end, for the gnawing persistence of his pain. The grey, sad merit of doing his drudging duty by the world for two or three more score of years--that, perhaps, lay before him; but a chilling, colourless glory was this, at once harder and less rewarding than the sudden flare of martyrdom through which Isabel had passed upwards on her way. For upwards she had gone, leaving him henceforth alone on the lower levels where they had first met. Isabel--selfish, passionate, barbarous Isabel--in one whirling moment had leapt above all the trammels of false desire and fear--had soared into the great heights of selflessness, and left far beneath her the outworn husk of her old struggling egoism. In that other state where she now went radiant, it must be another Isabel that lived and moved--a purified Isabel, stripped of many mean and selfish thoughts; an Isabel far nearer than before to the ultimate radiance towards which the whole world is inevitably tending through ages of slow purification. How should he even be able to catch up lost ground and come level with this glorified Isabel once more? And yet, again, without features--without the well-remembered features of body (without so many of the mind’s well-remembered features too)--how, even if chance should be given, was he to recognise the soul that had once been one with his own? She had utterly outstripped him in the race. No test of his endurance could equal that test of hers--no, not if he lived decently and honestly all his days, doing the best he could with his duty through the lagging years that probably lay ahead; why, that would be nothing to compare with her ordeal, no such swift burning furnace as that through which Isabel had passed, and from which she had emerged all gold in the sunlight of her future.