Into this world of insatiable emotion Kingston threw himself heartily--hopefully, too, seeing that the sincerity of his fellow-worshippers left no room for doubt, and that their enthusiastic belief seemed to give fair hope that it was justified. But soon he saw the fearful tragedy that lay beneath their enthusiasm, and realized how determined an illusion it was that they cultivated. He, too, no less than they, yearned and groped, but his nature, cooler, perhaps, than theirs, could not accept for pure gold of revelation the base ore of hysteria and fanaticism that they unwittingly but obstinately imposed upon themselves for truth. Their spirit-voices were nothing but the frustrate echoes of their own cries, cast back to them across the great gulf that separates the ignorant, unfaithful living from the free, glorified dead. Sounds and sights floated thick in their midst--honest sounds and sights, born of no trickery, indeed, but--though none dared to own it--engendered by the frantic zeal of the searchers themselves. They and none other supplied the words to which they listened in such ecstatic awe; they and none other evoked those vanished tones, those pale reflections of the well-beloved in which they took such comfort. Their very sincerity, their very rapture, only made more terrible the delusion on which they sustained themselves, the emptiness of the phantoms with which they tried to fill the lives that their own distrust had left to them desolate. Only want of faith can make death a reality. These sad, starving people, having made reality out of the shadow, now found themselves forced to create new shadows to exorcise the old. They had allowed themselves to think that death had power to sunder their loves, and now, after that first self-deception, the need was fierce upon them to invent another to nullify the first, and wipe out that death to which only their weak terrors had given an objective existence. From the beginning to the end they were altogether tragic--in their sorrow, in its cause, and in the means they took to heal it. Kingston, as the meetings passed, found himself more and more aloof from their consolations, more and more cold towards the manifestations that made the comfort of their poor struggling days.