And this foreknowledge of the end, this sensation of drifting daily more and more hurriedly towards something terrible, impelled him to cherish with a more and more eager passion this presence that had been vouchsafed to him, however incomplete, however unsatisfying he might find it. Each hour brought him nearer now to the last that should ever be. He bent himself sternly, in the lessening time that was his, to the desperate task of awakening recollection in a soul where recollection slept for ever. Less and less did he see or think of Ivor Restormel, more and more ardently, more and more despairingly, of the thing that dwelt in Ivor Restormel, the thing that soon must leave its habitation to pass elsewhere again. He sought the boy’s presence more and more persistently, would never spare him out of his sight, exacted more and more of his conversation. And all the while he was caring less and less for the boy, his words, or his utterance. Now that he had found out what it was that had attracted him to the boy, he was ceasing to see the boy himself at all, to hear his earthly voice. All Kingston’s attention was fixed on the glimpses that he could hope to get of the secret presence he divined, his ears were open only to those occasional flashes of memory that spoke in Ivor Restormel out of that remote past beyond the grave. He must make the dreadful most of the short time that was left him. It was but little he could hope to make, but the time, he felt, was running rapidly out towards its end. Gundred saw everything. Gundred understood nothing. That her husband grew keener and keener to monopolize Ivor Restormel she saw, and righteous anger became fiercer within her. That Kingston should so slight her company as obviously and vehemently to prefer that of a person against whom she had most solemnly warned him, was matter enough and to spare for just wrath. Gundred grew colder and colder in manner, lived more and more aloof, felt stronger and stronger in her consciousness of justified dread. That Kingston clung every moment to the side of his secretary she noticed; that, in reality, he did not care two straws about his secretary she could hardly be expected to discern. The plain and sufficing fact was that he never seemed happy, never at his ease, unless Ivor Restormel were with him, and even then he very rarely seemed perfectly satisfied either. Gundred saw that there was something unusual and mysterious about this friendship that in some ways scarcely seemed a friendship at all, yet made such tremendous claims on time and company.