Kingston had no hope that he could find such a key. The old Eastern stories showed the glorified free memory as the possession only of the free glorified soul that has escaped the bondage of desire. When desire has passed away, then the uncontaminated soul knows no barrier of time or space. But in the kingdom of desire are all the burning pains and limitations which desire provides to scourge its devotees in the very moment of their seeming satisfaction. To eyes desirous, life is narrowed to a thing of the moment; it is only from the high places of enlightenment that the opened eye of the Real Self can wander over all the fields of existence, and see the nullity of death, the eternity of truth and holiness, from bodily life to bodily life, until at last the great goal is gained. Kingston saw himself helpless now in the grip of the passion he had invoked. Nothing could satisfy it, nothing could release him from it. Nothing but the death of his body, and even that release seemed now to his awakening intelligence to be but problematical. He began to wonder what could be the end of this fantastic tangle. Days went by, and he found himself more tightly chained to the agony of his perpetual disappointment in Ivor Restormel, more cruelly hungry for the satisfaction which lay for ever in his sight and beyond his reach, more and more fiercely stung by the misery that he himself had brought upon himself. He grew into a sense of drifting towards a catastrophe; the strain, the torment could not be prolonged indefinitely without the sudden snap of his endurance. Some thunderclap of fate must break up the dreadful stagnation of this nightmare. As the time passed, and his efforts brought him no nearer to fulfilment, made it increasingly plain that he could never come any nearer to fulfilment, he felt the growing imminence of doom. This companion who was no companion, his desire had evoked It from the shadows, soon It must go back into the shadows from which he had called It, having first accomplished fully the punishment of his selfishness. He watched the human Ivor Restormel with a curious consciousness of watching a thing unearthly, a thing moving amid darkness towards a great darkness not so very far away. This boy, so much alive, so content with life, was not in reality alive at all. He was just a shadow, a faint film of personality, by comparison with the old living thing that lurked in him. Vague and indeterminate as his own character was, he was the penalty, made incarnate, of Kingston’s own selfishness; he was the eidolon of the past projected into the present in order to tantalize and damn the soul that had desired it. Built of clouds, he must pass back ere long, swiftly, tragically into cloudland, and that reality behind the clouds, that living fragment far down in the shadowy personality of the boy, must pass onwards again on its upward way--that strange immortal essence which once had been Isabel.