And she crept away. René called after her, but she did not hear him. He wished to keep her with him, to try to find some word that should comfort her. But he knew at once that the word would elude him, that there was nothing to say, that he and she were lost to each other, and must go their ways. All his efforts, all his hopes could wake no response in her. The mention of his father made him know how dearly she had loved the man, and he began to perceive the subtle force of love, how it can live in defiance of the will, and even through the failing of desire; how it uses even differences, even ruptures to bind and sustain; and how even the most selfish souls are knit with others, though it be to the destruction of every pleasant joy. He saw how little love needs consciousness, and how desperately men stand in need of it. Else are they consumed in love, and never for a moment do their lives take form and color before they sink to dust again, not wholly created before they are destroyed. Ideas of Kilner's came rushing back to René's mind, his description of his vision, the slow insistence on being given expression and form in paint, his own helplessness against the tyranny of what his eyes had seen and his imagination mastered. René began to understand that, to lose sense of time, to find in himself also a vision that had possessed him always. Only, unlike Kilner, he could not trace it back to any moment of ecstasy, any keen appreciation of some natural beauty, or the play of light. Light! That was the creating idea. Kilner responded to the light of the sun, René to the light of the imagination, the light of the sun wrought upon by men's minds, so that their life also had its sun to bring fertility, and make the body a spirit and love an intellectual thing; the light of the sun stored through all the generations to dissipate the terrors of life and the power of death, to concentrate upon all beloved objects and show them in their loveliness as visions urging to creation. And in his love of woman man seeks no reflection of his light but the flash of hers, that her beauty may not perish. René in his joy began to sing to himself. It was the song Cathleen had sung in the woods. He could see her again as she was there in the green haze of the woods, in the dappled light, mysterious and wild. From that he deliberately turned away to fix his gaze on the humorous reality, because there was nothing that he did not desire to sweep into his joy. He lit a match and gazed round the little, cheaply furnished room, the ugly toilet service, the yellow dressing-table, the silly patterned wall-paper of pallid roses, the execrable pictures on the wall. His eyes were dazzled by the light, and they ached. Came darkness again, and he hummed to himself as he thought of the morrow and the train, with its wheels humming along the rails, taking him nearer the goal of his desire. . . . . . .