Kingston promised vaguely to give his wife’s messages. Then Gundred passed on her way to interview the cook, and complete arrangements for the effectual dazzling of the mothers from Kensington and Campden Hill. Left alone, her husband took refuge for a moment or two in dreamland. This life of his, orderly, decorous, colourless, with Gundred superintending its details, and seeing that its food was good and hot--this life of his was not a real life at all. It was a vapour, a phantom, having no part in the true life of his soul. His body moved on its appointed course from breakfast through the day to bed, bandying banalities with its tongue, looking out on Gundred’s world with amiable eyes; but he himself, the real man, belonged to a remoter world. In strange, far-off lands he roamed, seeking that which for a time was lost; the gorgeous, sombre mysteries of life and death were about his head, shedding a glamour of ecstasy on the secret byway that he was treading. How Gundred would stare, what pious sillinesses would she not utter, if for a moment--if only for the smallest fragment of a moment--her eyes could be unsealed to see the magic tangle of visions in which her husband was wandering, all the while that his earthly gaze was fixed on her, his earthly ears politely attentive to her talk, his earthly stomach contentedly absorbing the food that she made it her daily duty to provide. Dressed, brushed, washed, and fed, the simulacrum of her husband passed through the world at her side, but the thing she walked with was a changeling; the man she loved and looked after was the mere shell of a stranger--of a stranger whose eyes were fixed on the immensities, whose ears received her words as jargon in a tongue unknown, whose whole life was passed in that world of reality whose shadows now and then are cast across this life of ours that we call real, in the glimpses of what we call a dream. Little, visible, tangible, clear was the life that Gundred thought the true; vast, illimitable, without end or beginning was that enormous infinite where the soul of Kingston ceaselessly went seeking for the lost.