And all the time Mr. Darnley said nothing, heard nothing of his guest’s protestations. This beautiful nervous boy had no interest for Kingston Darnley; he did not care what he said or felt or looked like. But the terror that haunted Ivor Restormel was not his; the mysterious attraction that filled him was not his own. Somewhere, deep down in his being, lived Something that had felt that terror, Something that exercised that attraction over Kingston, Something that called to Kingston as an old friend. And that Something, Kingston knew it, heard it calling to him imperiously out of the eternal past. It was the Something that had once carried the name and shape of Isabel. There was no mistaking it. Now at last Kingston understood what it was that had gripped him yesterday on the road, what inexplicable summons of old friendship. The dead had come back to him after many years. But clothed in alien flesh, forming part of a new personality, shut off from recognition by the barriers of the body. For in this boy lived only the one fragmentary recollection of the final catastrophe. Nothing in Kingston’s soul, no call of ancient kinship, no appeal to bygone pledges, could penetrate to the ears of that secret self. The dead had come back, known to him, but incapable of knowing him again. How could he wake memory in that changed thing which had returned, at once the same, and yet so different, in its freedom from that bond which once had made them one, and now, still as strong as ever in the hold it had over himself, had broken and fallen away for ever from the other soul it had gripped? Kingston looked at his visitor with a feeling that drew near to hatred. This stranger held the thing he still loved. The body and the shape of it was an irrelevant, a maddening accident; it was the secret thing that Kingston called to, the secret thing that was prevented from hearing by this new personality in which it had clothed itself. Kingston felt a sharp grudge against Ivor Restormel, his body, his brain, his beauty. That body, that brain, that beauty made the locked casket that imprisoned the living dead. And yet, inasmuch as Ivor Restormel was the shrine of that lost passion, he was, on the other hand, ineffably precious and sacred. He could not be let go. The boy himself was less than nothing; but what he held was more than everything.