It was not here, not amid these faint voices crying what the listeners wanted to hear, not amid these dim ghosts of bygone passion that his own still living, throbbing passion could hope to come once more into contact with Isabel. He pitied his fellow-seekers, but he stood aloof from them. Sorrowing for the intensity of their false joy, he could gain from their cult no sustenance for his own hunger. His hunger was not as theirs, and the beloved fallacies that supported them could give no nourishment to him. He saw that their quest was false, their methods a mere sop flung to their own desire. Gradually Kingston withdrew himself from their company. The spiritualistic world, after all, held no solid help or conviction for him. He passed away into everyday life again, and went back to his quiet expectancy at Gundred’s side. Sooner or later the wonderful thing would happen, sooner or later the holy mystery of separation stand revealed, but no unlawful human methods could avail to hurry the processes of God. They of little faith might make for themselves a world of phantoms in which to worship a phantom; he must persevere alone, waiting patiently for what was to come. Gladly, if he could, would he have found satisfaction in the hollow solace invented by his fellow-seekers, but as his nature, as his more exalted perceptions, could not allow him any such makeshift consolation, the sooner he quitted so unwholesome and unsatisfactory a life the better. At least, he had the comfort of feeling that he had left no method untried, had not neglected any possible chance. But the alley into which he had strayed had been found blind, a short cut towards the Great Nowhere. He must return into the broad, beaten track of life, and go steadfastly forward, in confidence that somewhere, some day, he should inevitably meet again his lost companion. CHAPTER XV ‘Dear Jim,’ said Gundred, ‘how happy he sounds!’ She folded up her son’s letter again, and put it deftly back into its envelope. He wrote to her once a week without fail from school, a neat, colourless letter, breathing duty and regard. To his father the boy wrote as the mood took him--careless, untidy epistles about the topic of the moment. ‘Another cup of tea, dear?’ she asked her husband, smiling at him across the table.