"Then—"
"Let us sit down in this shelter. There is no one in it. People are going home."
Malling followed him into a shelter, with a bench facing the sea.
"I thought perhaps here I might be able to tell you," said Mr. Harding. "I am in great trouble, Mr. Malling, in great trouble. But I don't know whether you, or whether any one, can assist me."
"If I may advise you, I should say—tell me plainly what your trouble is."
"It began—" Mr. Harding spoke with a faltering voice—"it began a good while ago, some months after Mr. Chichester came as a curate to St. Joseph's. I was then a very different man from the man you see now. Often I feel really as if I were not the same man, as if I were radically changed. It may be health. I sometimes try to think so. And then I—" He broke off.
The strange weakness that Malling had already noticed seemed again to be stealing over him, like a mist, concealing, attenuating.
"Possibly it is a question of health," said Malling, rather sharply.
"Tell me how it began."
"When Chichester first joined me, I was a man of power and ambition. I was a man who could dominate others, and I loved to dominate."
His strength seemed returning while he spoke, as if frankness were to him a restorative of the spirit.