Because duty and honour had seemed to call, he had sacrificed the thing he loved for the thing he had promised to love. Even in cold blood he would still have done the thing--must have done it; any other course would have been impossible, a treason, a horror. But the sacrifice had been a rending of the heart; his whole soul was strained and bleeding from the wrench--bleeding to death, he thought. And, while Isabel had won freedom for herself, he had gained nothing but a lifetime’s loneliness. Without any peddling notions of striking a bargain with the gods, he could not but feel the sarcasm of their smile. He had sold his life’s happiness--to buy a lifetime’s unhappiness and desolation. He had done what was an agony to do, in order to obtain that which would be a long agony to endure. So he looked angrily, contemptuously, on the chilly duty and self-respect which was all that his martyrdom had gained him. He hated them for what they had cost, and hated them the more for his inmost knowledge that the purchase had been inevitable. Life without Isabel! It seemed that his soul had never in all the ages imagined the possibility of such a thing, yet now he was to envisage it through every remaining day and hour of his existence. She was gone, rising on strong wings towards heaven; he remained on earth, alone for ever, he who had so helped her take her flight. So time dragged by, and insensibly the first agony of his loneliness wore down into a calmer sorrow. Isabel’s bones were duly buried, and honoured with a neat inscription devised by Gundred, and matters gradually began to fall into a settled course once more. Kingston began to return to ordinary life, and his private grief no longer claimed his whole attention. Between himself and Gundred a barrier still rose, but he grew able to give her his help, and, bit by bit, to share once more in the superficial interest of her days. She, for her part, went bravely on her way; with more courage and on a more difficult way than she or anyone else suspected. The new wing was built; the new wing lost its raw look of novelty; gradually Isabel and her end became to Gundred little more than a vague if awful memory. She was not the kind of woman whose nerves can be thrown permanently out of gear. Self-restraint had been drilled into her blood through many generations, and she made imperturbability the test-virtue of good breeding. Only once in all her life had perfect coolness failed her, and that one momentary lapse had been the immediate cause of Isabel’s death. For a long time the knowledge of this was her secret cross. In her heart of hearts, that last awful instant had showed her that Kingston loved Isabel, that his care for his wife was mere loyalty. The sudden perception, the combination of new terrors and responsibilities had been suddenly too much for her endurance, already sapped and damaged by hidden anxieties and by the shock of the accident. Not meaning to be selfish,