At the very notion fresh interest in life began to animate him. Without any weak cowardice or giving way he had yet, since the tragedy of twenty years before, lost any personal interest in every-day life, its bustle and ambitions. That career into which his mother had hoped so vaguely to push him and support him by the influence of March and Brakelond, had long since faded from the foreground of his mind. When at last Lady Adela gently and imperceptibly passed away, she left her son fairly settled into the position of his wife’s husband. Concentrated on thoughts of that beautiful past, he never again plucked up any enthusiasm for the present or the future. It was not that he was afraid of them, that he had shrinkings or morbid tenderness; they simply failed to interest him any more. He retired into that small secret life of his own, and the world gradually came to look on Mr. Darnley as the pleasant but unnoticeable appendage to Lady Gundred. Comfortably vast as was his income, Brakelond, that insatiable old monster, swallowed it all and gave no thanks. Despite his money, therefore, Kingston soon unconsciously held that subtly meek and subordinate place of a man whose wife it is that owns the estate and the money. He had no wish to assert himself, and even at Ivescar it was Gundred who now held the reins, and concentrated the general gaze upon herself. Now and then she deplored to their friends her husband’s apathy towards the Primrose League, but, on the whole, she had everybody’s agreement when she talked of him as ‘perfectly happy in his library among his books.’ “To be perfectly happy in one’s library among one’s books” is the blessed euphemistic privilege of the obscure rich, and Kingston acquiesced gratefully in his friends’ attitude towards his remoteness from their life and the empty clamours that seemed to fill it. Accustomed long since to his own quiet, inconspicuous path, it was with a kindling of vitality, then, that he contemplated sallying forth into the spirit world. It was a stirring of his old self, an emancipation from the obsession of Gundred’s majesty. Half ashamed, half excited, half contemptuous did Kingston set out to enter into relations with the dead.