Kingston could never bring himself to feel that Isabel--the real Isabel, as distinct from the body she had worn--was dead; he knew that she still lived, somewhere, somehow; he felt it in every fibre of his life; every nerve vibrated with the knowledge that somewhere, in some remote corner of the world, that lost half of himself was still alive. As the years passed his ideas, instead of growing fainter, grew keener, more fixed, more certain. He lived in mysterious expectation of a call, the sound of a voice he should recognise, some hint that Isabel had come back, that their paths through the world had crossed again. Sooner or later the call would come; it was impossible that it should not. He and Isabel were so close together; accidents like physical death could not be any permanent barrier. As the time went by he grew more and more sure that the call must come soon. Each day he hoped that the sign might be shown to-morrow, and, deep in his heart, listened in every conversation for the sound of Isabel’s voice, and looked in every face for a memory of Isabel’s. Meanwhile he lived out his placid life, friends with all, popular, suspected no longer of any eccentricities. The gentle, managing woman at his side had never any notion that her husband was cherishing such fantastic hopes. To her he had long been, in reality, a stranger, a stranger very dearly loved, and very faithfully looked after, but a stranger none the less, as are so many of us to those who love us best. As for Isabel, if Gundred ever recalled her name now, it was with a feeling of wrath that grew steadily towards hatred. Isabel stood for the one moment in which Gundred had faltered, in which she had not been sure of herself. Isabel was a painful memory, not only as recalling that far-off period of unrest, but also as raking back into recollection that one awful instant in which Gundred’s courage had failed her--with results so disastrous for poor Isabel. Had the results not been quite so disastrous for Isabel, Gundred could better perhaps have borne the recollection. As it was, they convicted her of inadequacy, and touched her secret pride in its tender point. She pushed such horrid reflections far back in the most private cupboards of her consciousness, and hated Isabel anew whenever accident compelled her to open the locked doors and turn over those dreadful bones of her one failure.