He was always laying traps for him, watching him, trying to stir up the spirit that possessed him. Gladly would Kingston have pierced between Ivor and the secret thing that inhabited him. The one he valued not at all, or only as containing the other which he now valued above everything in the world, for ever beyond his reach though it was. He resented the boy’s body, his beauty, his young developing nature which, sooner or later, might be expected to conquer those old dim memories and achieve the ultimate death of the Isabel he had known those twenty years before. If he could have set free the sleeping soul he would gladly have seen its new body break up and die. He hated that new body, which made so impermeable a wall between himself and the vanished thing he had so vainly found again. He looked on Ivor Restormel as an unarmed burglar might look on an impregnable safe in which lies the diamond of his ambition. The safe is precious and desirable because of the diamond inside, but, in so far as it makes the diamond impregnable, is doubly detestable for the very fact that the diamond _is_ inside. And in Kingston’s case the problem was even crueller; for the burglar may, with long labour, break the safe and attain the diamond. Kingston, in breaking the safe, would by the same action cause the diamond to vanish once more. As things stood, the safety--at all events, the continued proximity--of the diamond depended entirely on the continued security and inviolate condition of the safe.