E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Project Gutenberg Beginners Projects,

Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

THE DWELLER ON THE THRESHOLD

by

ROBERT HICHENS

Author of The Garden of Allah, Bella Donna, Egypt and Its
Monuments, The Holy Land, etc.

1911

I

When Evelyn Malling, notorious because of his sustained interest in Psychical Research and his work for Professor Stepton, first met the Rev. Marcus Harding, that well-known clergyman was still in the full flow of his many activities. He had been translated from his labors in Liverpool to a West End church in London. There he had proved hitherto an astonishing success. On Hospital Sundays the total sums collected from his flock were by far the largest that came from the pockets of any congregation in London. The music in St. Joseph's was allowed by connoisseurs, who knew their Elgar as well as their Goss, their Perosi as well as their Bach, and their Wesley, to be remarkable. Critical persons, mostly men, who sat on the fence between Orthodoxy and Atheism, thought highly of Mr. Harding's sermons, and even sometimes came down on his side. And, of all signs surely the most promising for a West End clergyman's success, smart people flocked to him to be married, and Arum lilies were perpetually being carried in and out of his chancel, which was adorned with Morris windows. He was married to a woman who managed to be admirable without being dull, Lady Sophia, daughter of the late Earl of Mansford, and sister of the present peer. He was comfortably off. His health as a rule was good, though occasionally he suffered from some obscure form of dyspepsia. And he was still comparatively young, just forty-eight.

Nevertheless, as Evelyn Malling immediately perceived, Mr. Harding was not a happy man.

In appearance he was remarkable. Of commanding height, with a big frame, a striking head and countenance, and a pair of keen gray eyes, he looked like a man who was intended by nature to dominate. White threads appeared in his thick brown hair, which he wore parted in the middle. But his face, which was clean-shaven, had not many telltale lines. And he did not look more than his age.

The sadness noted by Malling was at first evasive and fleeting, not indellibly fixed in the puckers of a forehead, or in the down-drawn corners of a mouth. It was as a thin, almost impalpable mist, that can scarcely be seen, yet that alters all the features in a landscape ever so faintly. Like a shadow it traveled across the eyes, obscured the forehead, lay about the lips. And as a shadow lifts it lifted. But it soon returned, like a thing uneasy that is becoming determined to discover an abiding-place.

Malling's first meeting with the clergyman took place upon Westminster Bridge on an afternoon in early May, when London seemed, almost like a spirited child, to be flinging itself with abandon into the first gaieties of the season. Malling was alone, coming on foot from Waterloo. Mr. Harding was also on foot, with his senior curate, the Rev. Henry Chichester, who was an acquaintance of Malling, but whom Malling had not seen for a considerable period of time, having been out on his estate in Ceylon. At the moment when Malling arrived upon the bridge the two clergymen were standing by the parapet on the Parliament side, looking out over the river. As he drew near to them the curate glanced suddenly round, saw him, and uttered an involuntary exclamation which attracted Mr. Harding's attention.

"Telepathy!" said Chichester, shaking Malling by the hand. "I believe I looked round because I knew I should see you. Yet I supposed you to be still in Ceylon." He glanced at the rector rather doubtfully, seemed to take a resolution, and with an air almost of doggedness added, "May I?" and introduced the two men to one another.

Mr. Harding observed the new-comer with an interest that was unmistakable.

"You are the Mr. Malling of whom Professor Stepton has spoken to me," he said,—"who has done so much experimental work for him?"

"Yes."

"The professor comes to my church now and then."

"I have heard him say so."

"You saw we were looking at the river? Before I came to London I was at Liverpool, and learned there to love great rivers. There is something in a great river that reminds us—"

He caught his curate's eye and was silent.

"Are you walking my way?" asked Malling. "I am going by the Abbey and
Victoria Street to Cadogan Square."

"Then we will accompany you as far as Victoria Station," said the rector.

"You don't think it would be wiser to take a hansom?" began Chichester.
"You remember—"

"No, no, certainly not. Walking always does me good," rejoined Mr.
Harding, almost in a tone of rebuke.

The curate said nothing more, and the three men set out toward Parliament
Square, Malling walking between the two clergymen.

He felt embarrassed, and this surprised him, for he was an extremely self-reliant man and entirely free from shyness. At first he thought that possibly his odd discomfort arose from the fact that he was in company with two men who, perhaps, had quite recently had a difference which they were endeavoring out of courtesy to conceal from him. Perhaps there had been a slight quarrel over some parish matter. Certainly when he first spoke with them there had been something uneasy, a suspicion of strain, in the manner of both. But then he remembered how, before Chichester had turned round, they had been leaning amicably above the river.

No, it could not be that. He sought mentally for some other reason. But while he did so he talked, and endeavored to rid himself promptly of the unwelcome feeling that beset him.

In this effort, however, he did not at first succeed. The "conditions" were evidently unsatisfactory. He wondered whether if he were not walking between the two men he would feel more comfortable, and presently, at a crossing, he managed to change his place. He was now next to Mr. Harding, who had the curate on his other side, and at once he felt more at his ease. The rector of St. Joseph's led the conversation, in which Malling joined, and at first the curate was silent. But presently Malling noticed a thing that struck him as odd. Chichester began to "chip in" now and then, and whenever he did so it was either to modify what Mr. Harding had just said, or to check him in what he was saying, or abruptly to introduce a new topic of talk. Sometimes Mr. Harding did not appear to notice these interruptions; at other times he obviously resented them; at others again he yielded with an air of anxiety, almost of fear, to his curate's attenuations or hastened to follow his somewhat surprising leads down new conversational paths. Malling could not understand Chichester. But it became evident to him that for some reason or other the curate was painfully critical of his rector, as sometimes highly sensitive people are critical of members of their own family. And Mr. Harding was certainly aware of this critical attitude, and at moments seemed to be defiant of it, at other moments to be almost terrorized by it.

All that passed, be it noted, passed as between gentlemen, rather glided in the form of nuance than trampled heavily in more blatant guise. But Evelyn Malling was a highly trained observer and a man in whom investigation had become a habit. Now that he was no longer ill at ease he became deeply interested in the relations between the two men with whom he was walking. He was unable to understand them, and this fact of course increased his interest. Moreover he was surprised by the change he observed in Chichester.

Although he had never been intimate with Henry Chichester, he had known him fairly well, and had summed him up as a very good man and a decidedly attractive man, but marred, as Malling thought, by a definite weakness of character. He had been too amiable, too ready to take others on their own valuation of themselves, too kind-hearted, and too easily deceived. The gentleness of a saint had been his, but scarcely the firmness of a saint. Industrious, dutiful, and conscientious, he had not struck Malling as a man of strong intellect, though he was a cultivated and well-educated man. Though not governed by his own passions,—when one looked at him one had been inclined to doubt whether he had any,—he had seemed prone to be governed by those about him, at any rate in little matters of every day. His charm had consisted in his transparent goodness, and in an almost gay kindliness which had seemed to float round him like an atmosphere. To look into his face had been to look at the happiness which comes only to those who do right things, and are at peace with their own souls.

What could have happened to change this charming, if too pliant, personality into the critical, watchful, almost—so at moments it seemed to Malling—aggressive curate who was now, always in a gentlemanly way, making things rather difficult for his rector?

And the matter became the more mysterious when Malling considered Mr. Harding. For here was a man obviously of dominant personality. Despite his fleeting subservience to Chichester, inexplicable to Malling, he was surely by far the stronger of the two, both in intellect and character. Not so saintly, perhaps, he was more likely to influence others. Firmness showed in his forcible chin, energy in the large lines of his mouth, decision in his clear-cut features. Yet there was something contradictory in his face. And the flitting melancholy, already remarked, surely hinted at some secret instability, perhaps known only to Harding himself, perhaps known to Chichester also.

When the three men came to the turning at the corner of the Grosvenor
Hotel, Chichester stopped short.

"Here is our way," he said, speaking across Mr. Harding to Malling.

The rector looked at Malling.

"Have you far to go?" he asked, with rather a tentative air.

"I live in Cadogan Square."

"Of course. I remember. You told us you were going there."

"Good-by," said Chichester. "We are taking the underground to South
Kensington."

"I think I shall walk," said the rector.

"But you know we are due—"

"There is plenty of time. Tell them I shall be there at four."

"But really—"

"Punctually at four. I will walk on with Mr. Malling."

"I really think you had better not," began Chichester. "Over-exertion—"

"Am I an invalid?" exclaimed Mr. Harding, almost sharply.

"No, no, of course not. But you remember that yesterday you were not quite well."

"That is the very reason why I wish to walk. Exercise always does my dyspepsia good."

"Let us all walk," said the curate, abruptly.

But this was obviously not Mr. Harding's intention.

"I want you to go through the minutes and the accounts before the meeting," he said, in a quieter but decisive voice. "We will meet at the School at four. You will have plenty of time if you take the train. And meanwhile Mr. Malling and I will go on foot together as far as Cadogan Square."

Chichester stood for a moment staring into Mr. Harding's face, then he said, almost sulkily:

"Very well. Good-by."

He turned on his heel, and was lost in the throng near the station.

It seemed to Malling that an expression of relief overspread his companion's face.

"You don't mind my company for a little longer, I hope?" said the rector.

"I shall be glad to have it."

They set out on their walk to Cadogan Square. After two or three minutes of silence the rector remarked:

"You know Chichester well?"

"I can hardly say that. I used to meet him sometimes with some friends of mine, the Crespignys. But I haven't seen him for more than two years."

"He's a very good fellow."

"An excellent fellow."

"Perhaps a little bit limited in his outlook. He has been with me at St.
Joseph's exactly two years."

The rector seemed about to say more, then shut his large mouth almost with a snap. Malling made no remark. He was quite certain that snap was merely the preliminary to some further remark about Chichester. And so it proved. As they came to St. Peter's Eaton Square, the rector resumed:

"I often think that it is a man's limitations which make him critical of others. The more one knows, the wider one's outlook, the readier one is to shut one's eyes to the foibles, even to the faults, of one's neighbors. I have tried to impress that upon our friend Chichester."

"Doesn't he agree with you?"

"Well—it's difficult to say, difficult to say. Shall we go by Wilton
Place, or—?"

"Certainly."

"Professor Stepton has talked to me about you from time to time, Mr.
Malling."

"He's a remarkable man," said Malling almost with enthusiasm.

"Yes. He's finding his way to the truth rather by the pathway of science than by the pathway of faith. But he's a man I respect. And I believe he'll get out into the light. You've done a great deal of work for him, I understand, in—in occult directions."

"I have made a good many careful investigations at his suggestion."

"Exactly. Now"—Mr. Harding paused, seemed to make an effort, and continued—"we know very little even now, with all that has been done, as to—to the possibilities—I scarcely know how to put it—the possibilities of the soul."

"Very little indeed," rejoined Malling.

He was considerably surprised by his companion's manner, but was quite resolved not to help him out.

"The possibilities of one soul, let us say, in connection with another," continued the rector, almost in a faltering voice. "I often feel as if the soul were a sort of mysterious fluid, and that when we what is called influence another person, we, as it were, submerge his soul fluid in our own, as a drop of water might be submerged in an ocean."

"Ah!" said Malling, laconically.

Mr. Harding shot a rather sharp glance at him.

"You don't object to my getting on this subject, I hope?" he observed.

"Certainly not."

"Perhaps you think it rather a strange one for a clergyman to select?"

"Oh, no. I have known many clergymen deeply interested in Stepton's investigations."

Mr. Harding's face, which had been cloudy, cleared.

"It seems to me," he said, "that we clergymen have a special reason for desiring Stepton, and all Stepton's assistants, to make progress. It is true, of course, that we live by faith. And nothing can be more beautiful than a childlike faith in the Great Being who is above all worlds, in the anima mundi. But it would be unnatural in us if we did not earnestly desire that our faith be proved, scientifically proved, to be well-founded. I speak now of the faith we Christians hold in a life beyond the grave. I know many people who think it very wrong in a clergyman to mix himself up in any occult experiments. But I don't agree with them."

It was now Malling's turn to look sharply at his companion.

"Have you made many experiments yourself, may I ask?" he said very bluntly.

The clergyman started, and was obviously embarrassed by the question.

"I! Oh, I was speaking generally. I am a very busy man, you see. What with my church and my parish, and one thing and another, I get very little time for outside things. Still I am greatly interested, I confess, in all that Stepton is doing."

"Does Mr. Chichester share your interest?" said Malling.

"In a minor degree, in a minor degree," answered the rector, rather evasively.

They were now in Sloane Street and Malling said:

"I must turn off here."

"I'll go with you as far as your door if you've no objection," said the rector, who seemed very loath to leave his companion. "It's odd how men change, isn't it?"

"As they grow older? But surely development is natural and to be expected?"

"Certainly. But when a man changes drastically, sheds his character and takes on another?"

"You are talking perhaps of what is called conversion?"

"Well, that would be an instance of what I mean, no doubt. But there are changes of another type. We clergymen, you know, mix intimately with so many men that we are almost bound to become psychologists if we are to do any good. It becomes a habit with many of us to study closely our fellow-men. Now I, for instance; I cannot live at close quarters with a man without, almost unconsciously, subjecting him to a minute scrutiny, and striving to sum him up. My curates, for example—"

"Yes?" said Malling.

"There are four of them, our friend Chichester being the senior one."

"And you have 'placed' them all?"

"I thought I had, I thought so—but—"

Mr. Harding was silent. Then, with a strange abruptness, and the air of a man forced into an action against which something within him protested, he said:

"Mr. Malling, you are the only person I know who, having been acquainted with Henry Chichester, has at last met him again after a prolonged interval of separation. Two years, you said. People who see a man from day to day observe very little or nothing. Changes occur and are not noticed by them. A man and his wife live together and grow old. But does either ever notice when the face of the other begins first to lose its bloom, to take on that peculiar, unmistakable stamp that the passage of the years sets on us all? Few of us really see what is always before us. But the man who comes back—he sees. Tell me the honest truth, I beg of you. Do you or do you not, see a great change in Henry Chichester?"

The rector's voice had risen while he spoke, till it almost clamored for reply. His eyes were more clamorous still, insistent in their demand upon Malling. Nevertheless voice and eyes pushed Malling toward caution. Something within him said, "Be careful what you do!" and, acting surprise, he answered:

"Chichester changed! In what way?"

The rector's countenance fell.

"You haven't observed it?"

"Remember I've only seen him to-day and walking in the midst of crowds."

"Quite true! Quite true!"

Mr. Harding meditated for a minute, and then said:

"Mr. Malling, I daresay my conduct to-day may surprise you. You may think it odd of me to be so frank, seeing that you and I have not met before. But Stepton has told me so much about you that I cannot feel we are quite strangers. I should like you to have an opportunity of observing Henry Chichester without prejudice. I will say nothing more. But if I invite you to meet him, in my house or elsewhere, will you promise me to come?"

"Certainly, if I possibly can."

"And your address?"

Malling stopped and, smiling, pointed to the number outside a house.

"You live here?"

Mr. Harding took a small book and a pencil from his pocket and noted down the address.

"Good-by," he said. "I live in Onslow Gardens—Number 89."

"Thank you. Good-by."

The two men shook hands. Then Mr. Harding went on his way toward South Kensington, while Malling inserted his latch-key into the door of Number 7b, Cadogan Square.

II

Evelyn Malling was well accustomed to meeting with strange people and making investigations into strange occurrences. He was not easily surprised, nor was he easily puzzled. By nature more skeptical than credulous, he had a cool brain, and he was seldom, if ever, the victim of his imagination. But on the evening of the day in question he found himself continually dwelling, and with a curiously heated mind, upon the encounter of that afternoon. Mr. Harding's manner in the latter part of their walk together had—he scarcely knew why—profoundly impressed him. He longed to see the clergyman again. He longed, almost more ardently, to pay a visit to Henry Chichester. Although the instinct of caution, which had perhaps been developed in him by his work among mediums, cranks of various kinds, and charlatans, had prevented him from letting the rector know that he had been struck by the change in the senior curate, that change had greatly astonished him. Yet was it really so very marked? He had noticed it before his attention had been drawn to it. That he knew. But was he not now, perhaps, exaggerating its character, "suggestioned" as it were by the obvious turmoil of Mr. Harding? He wondered, and was disturbed by his wonderment. Two or three times he got up, with the intention of jumping into a cab, and going to Westminster to find out if Professor Stepton was in town. But he only got as far as the hall. Then something seemed to check him. He told himself that he was in no fit condition to meet the sharp eyes of the man of science, who delighted in his somewhat frigid attitude of mind toward all supposed supernormal manifestations, and he returned to his study and tried to occupy himself with a book.

On the occasion of his last return, just as he was about to sit down, his eyes chanced to fall on an almanac framed in silver which stood on his writing-table. He took it up and stared at it. May 8, Friday—May 9, Saturday—May 10, Sunday. It was May 9. He put the almanac back on the table with a sudden sense of relief. For he had come to a decision.

To-morrow he would attend morning service at St. Joseph's.

Malling was not a regular church-goer. He belonged to the Stepton breed. But he was an earnest man and no scoffer, and some of his best friends were priests and clergymen. Nevertheless it was in a rather unusual go-to-meeting frame of mind that he got into a tail-coat and top hat, and set forth in a hansom to St. Joseph's the next morning.

He had never been there before. As he drew near he found people flowing toward the great church on foot, in cabs and carriages. Evidently Mr. Harding had attractive powers, and Malling began to wonder whether he would have any difficulty in obtaining the seat he wanted, in some corner from which he could get a good view both of the chancel and the pulpit. Were vergers "bribable"? What an ignoramus he was about church matters!

He smiled to himself as he paid the cabman and joined the stream of church-goers which was passing in through the open door.

Just as he was entering the building someone in the crowd by accident jostled him, and he was pushed rather roughly against a tall lady immediately before him. She turned round with a startled face, and Malling hastily begged her pardon.

"I was pushed," he said. "Forgive me."

The lady smiled, her lips moved, doubtless in some words of conventional acceptance, then she disappeared in the throng, taking her way toward the left of the church. She was a slim woman, with a white streak in her dark hair just above the forehead. Her face, which was refined and handsome, had given to Malling a strong impression of anxiety. Even when it had smiled it had looked almost tragically anxious, he thought. The church was seated with chairs, and a man, evidently an attendant, told him that all the chairs in the right and left aisles were free. He made his way to the right, and was fortunate enough to get one not far from the pulpit. Unluckily, from it he could only see the left-hand side of the choir. But the preacher would be full in his view. The organ sounded; the procession appeared. Over the heads of worshipers—he was a tall man—Malling perceived both Mr. Harding and Chichester. The latter took his place at the end of the left-hand row of light-colored oaken stalls next to the congregation. Malling could see him well. But the rector was hidden from him. He fixed his eyes upon Chichester.

The service went on its way. The music was excellent. A fair young man, who looked as if he might be a first-rate cricketer, one of the curates no doubt, read the lessons. Chichester intoned with an agreeable light tenor voice. During the third hymn, "Fight the Good Fight," Mr. Harding mounted into the pulpit. He let down the brass reading-desk. He had no notes in his hands. Evidently he was going to preach extempore. After the "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" had been pronounced, Malling settled himself to listen. He felt tensely interested. Both Mr. Harding and Chichester were now before him, the one as performer—he used the word mentally, with no thought of irreverence—the other as audience. He could study both as he wished to study them at that moment.

Chichester was a small, cherubic man, with blue eyes, fair hair, and neat features, the sort of man who looks as if when a boy he must have been the leading choir-boy in a cathedral. There was nothing powerful in his face, but much that was amiable and winning. His chin and his forehead were rather weak. His eyes and his mouth looked good. Or—did they?

Malling found himself wondering as Mr. Harding preached.

And was Mr. Harding the powerful preacher he was reputed to be?

At first he held his congregation. That was evident. Rows of rapt faces gazed up at him, as he leaned over the edge of the pulpit, or stood upright with his hands pressed palm downward upon it. But it seemed to Malling that he held them rather because of his reputation, because of what they confidently expected of him, because of what he had done in the past, than because of what he was actually doing. And presently they slipped out of his grasp. He lost them.

The first thing that is necessary in an orator, if he is to be successful with an audience, is confidence in himself, a conviction that he has something to say which is worth saying, which has to be said. Malling perceived that on this Sunday morning Mr. Harding possessed neither self-confidence nor conviction; though he made a determined, almost a violent, effort to pretend that he had both. He took as the theme of his discourse self-knowledge, and as his motto—so he called it—-the words, "Know thyself." This was surely a promising subject. He began to treat it with vigor. But very soon it became evident that he was ill at ease, as an actor becomes who cannot get into touch with his audience. He stumbled now and then in his sentences, harked back, corrected a phrase, modified a thought, attenuated a statement. Then, evidently bracing himself up, almost aggressively he delivered a few passages that were eloquent enough. But the indecision returned, became more painful. He even contradicted himself. A "No, that is not so. I should say—" communicated grave doubts as to his powers of clear thinking to the now confused congregation. People began to cough and to shift about in their chairs. A lady just beneath the pulpit unfolded a large fan and waved it slowly to and fro. Mr. Harding paused, gazed at the fan, looked away from it, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, grasped the pulpit ledge, and went on speaking, but now with almost a faltering voice.

The congregation were doubtless ignorant of the cause of their pastor's perturbation, but Malling felt sure that he knew what it was.

The cause was Henry Chichester.

On the cherubic face of the senior curate, as he leaned back in his stall while Mr. Harding gave out the opening words of the sermon, there had been an expression that was surely one of anxiety, such as a master's face wears when his pupil is about to give some public exhibition. That simile came at once into Malling's mind. It was the master listening to the pupil, fearing for, criticizing, striving mentally to convey help to the pupil. And as the sermon went on it was obvious to Malling that the curate was not satisfied with it, and that his dissatisfaction was, as it were, breaking the rector down. At certain statements of Mr. Harding looks of contempt flashed over Chichester's face, transforming it. The anxiety of the master, product of vanity but also of sympathy, was overlaid by the powerful contempt of a man who longs to traverse misstatements but is forced by circumstances to keep silence. And so certain was Malling that the cause of Mr. Harding's perturbation lay in Chichester's mental attitude, that he longed to spring up, to take the curate by the shoulders and to thrust him out of the church. Then all would be well. He knew it. The rector's self-confidence would return and, with it, his natural powers.

But now the situation was becoming painful, almost unbearable.

With every sentence the rector became more involved, more hesitating, more impotent. The sweat ran down his face. Even his fine voice was affected. It grew husky. It seemed to be failing. Yet he would not cease. To Malling he gave the impression of a man governed by a secret obstinacy, fighting on though he knew it was no use, that he had lost the combat. Malling longed to cry out to him, "Give it up!"

The congregation coughed more persistently, and the lady with the fan began to ply her instrument of torture almost hysterically.

Suddenly Malling felt obliged to look toward the left of the crowded church. Sitting up very straight, and almost craning his neck, he stared over the heads of the fidgeting people and met the eyes of a woman, the lady with the streak of white hair against whom he had pushed when coming in.

There was a look almost of anguish on her face. She turned her eyes toward Mr. Harding. At the same instant the rector saw Mailing in the congregation. He stopped short, muttered an uneven sentence, then, forcing his voice, uttered in unnaturally loud tones the "Now to God the Father," et cetera.

Henry Chichester rose in his stall with an expression of intense thankfulness, which yet seemed somehow combined with a sneer.

The collection was made.

Before the celebration some of the choir and two of the clergy, of whom Mr. Harding was one, left the church. Henry Chichester and the fair, athletic-looking curate remained. Mailing took his hat and made his way slowly to the door. As he emerged a young man stopped him and said:

"If you please, sir, the rector would like to speak to you if you could wait just a moment. You are Mr. Malling, I believe."

"Yes. How could you know?"

"Mr. Harding told me what you were like, sir, and that you were wearing a tie with a large green stone in it. Begging your pardon, sir."

"I will wait," said Malling, marveling at the rector's rapid and accurate powers of observation.

Those of the congregation who had not remained for the celebration were quickly dispersing, but Malling now noticed that the lady with the white lock was, like himself, waiting for some one. She stood not far from him. She was holding a parasol, and looking down; she moved its point to and fro on the ground. Several people greeted her. Almost as if startled she glanced up quickly, smiled, replied. Then, as they went on, she again looked down. There was a pucker in her brow. Her lips twitched now and then.

Suddenly she lifted her head, turned and forced her quivering mouth to smile. Mr. Harding had come into sight round the corner of the church.

"Ah, Mr. Malling," he said, "so you have stayed. Very good of you.
Sophia, let me introduce Mr. Malling to you—my wife, Lady Sophia."

The lady with the white lock held out her hand.

"You have heard Professor Stepton speak of Mr. Malling, haven't you?" added the rector to his wife.

"Indeed I have," she answered.

She smiled again kindly, and as if resolved to throw off her depression began to talk with some animation as they all walked together toward the street. Directly they reached it the rector said:

"Are you engaged to lunch to-day, Mr. Malling?"

"No," answered Malling.

Lady Sophia turned to him and said:

"Then I shall be informal and beg you to lunch with us, if you don't mind our being alone. We lunch early, at one, as my husband is tired after his morning's work and eats virtually nothing at breakfast."

"I shall be delighted," said Malling. "It's very kind of you."

"We always walk home," said the rector.

He sighed. It was obvious that he was in low spirits after the failure of the morning, but he tried to conceal the fact, and his wife tactfully helped him. Malling praised the music warmly, and remarked on the huge congregation.

"I scarcely thought I should find a seat," he added.

"It is always full to the doors in the morning," said Lady Sophia, with a cheerfulness that was slightly forced.

She glanced at her husband, and suddenly added, not without a decided touch of feminine spite:

"Unless Mr. Chichester, the senior curate, is preaching."

"My dear Sophy!" exclaimed Mr. Harding.

"Well, it is so!" she said, with a sort of petulance.

"Perhaps Mr. Chichester is not gifted as a preacher," said Malling.

"Oh, I wouldn't say that," said the rector.

"My husband never criticizes his—swans," said Lady Sophia, with delicate malice, and a glance full of meaning at Malling. "But I'm a woman, and my principles are not so high as his."

"You do yourself an injustice," said the rector. "Here we are."

He drew out his latch-key.

Before lunch Malling was left alone for a few minutes in the drawing-room with Lady Sophia. The rector had to see a parishioner who had called and was waiting for him in his study. Directly her husband had left the room Lady Sophia turned to Malling and said:

"Had you ever heard my husband preach till this morning?"

"No, never," Mailing answered. "I'm afraid I'm not a very regular church-goer. I must congratulate you again on the music at St. Joseph's. It is exceptional. Even at St. Anne's Soho—"

Almost brusquely she interrupted him. She was obviously in a highly nervous condition; and scarcely able to control herself.

"Yes, yes, our music is always good, of course. So glad you liked it. But what I want to say is that you haven't heard my husband preach this morning."

Malling looked at her with curiosity, but without astonishment. He might have acted a part with her as he had the previous day with her husband. But, as he looked, he came to a rapid decision, to be more frank with the woman than he had been with the man.

"You mean, of course, that your husband was not in his best vein," he said. "I won't pretend that I didn't realize that."

"You didn't hear him at all. He wasn't himself—simply."

She sat down on a sofa and clasped her hands together.

"I cannot tell you what I was feeling," she added. "And he used to be so full of self-confidence. It was his great gift. His self-confidence carried him through everything. Nothing could have kept him back if—"

Suddenly she checked herself and looked, with a sort of covert inquiry, at Malling.

"You must think me quite mad to talk like this," she said, with a return to her manner when he first met her.

"Shall I tell you what I really think?" he asked, leaning forward in the chair he had taken.

"Yes, do, do!"

"I think you are very ambitious for your husband and that your ambition for him has received a perhaps mysterious—check."

Before she could reply the door opened and Mr. Harding reappeared.

At lunch he carefully avoided any reference to church matters, and they talked on general subjects. Lady Sophia showed herself a nervously intelligent and ardent woman. It seemed to Malling obvious that she was devoted to her husband, "wrapped up in" him—to use an expressive phrase. Any failure on his part upset her even more than it did him. Secretly she must still be quivering from the public distresses of the morning. But she now strove to aid the rector's admirable effort to be serene, and proved herself a clever talker, and well informed on the events of the day. Of her Malling got a fairly clear impression.

But his impression of her husband was confused and almost nebulous.

"Do you smoke?" asked Mr. Harding, when lunch was over.

Malling said that he did.

"Then come and have a cigar in my study."

"Yes, do go," said Lady Sophia. "A quiet talk with you will rest my husband."

And she went away, leaving the two men together.

Mr. Harding's study looked out at the back of the house upon a tiny strip of garden. It was very comfortably, though not luxuriously, furnished, and the walls were lined with bookcases. While his host went to a drawer to get the cigar-box, Malling idly cast his eyes over the books in the shelves nearest to him. He always liked to see what a man had to read. The first book his eyes rested upon was Myers's "Human Personality." Then came a series of works by Hudson, including "Psychic Phenomena," then Oliver Lodge's "Survival of Man," "Man and the Universe," and "Life and Matter." Farther along were works by Lowes Dickinson and Professor William James, Bowden's "The Imitation of Buddha" and Inge's "Christian Mysticism." At the end of the shelf, bound in white vellum, was Don Lorenzo Scupoli's "The Spiritual Combat."

A drawer shut, and Mailing turned about to take the cigar which Mr.
Harding offered him.

"The light is rather strong, don't you think?" Mr. Harding said, when the two men had lit up. "I'll lower the blind."

He did so, and they sat down in a sort of agreeable twilight, aware of the blaze of an almost un-English sun without.

Malling settled down to his cigar with a very definite intention to clear up his impressions of the rector. The essence of the man baffled him. He had known more about Lady Sophia in five minutes than he knew about Mr. Harding now, although he had talked with him, walked with him, heard him preach, and watched him intently while he was doing so. His confusion and distress of the morning were comprehended by Malling. They were undoubtedly caused by the preacher's painful consciousness of the presence and criticism of one whom, apparently, he feared, or of whose adverse opinion at any rate he was in peculiar dread. But what was the character of the man himself? Was he saint or sinner, or just ordinary, normal man, with a usual allowance of faults and virtues? Was he a man of real force, or was he painted lath? The Chichester episodes seemed to point to the latter conclusion. But Malling was too intelligent to take everything at its surface value. He knew much of the trickery of man, but that knowledge did not blind him to the mystery of man. He had exposed charlatans. Yet he had often said to himself, "Who can ever really expose another? Who can ever really expose himself?" Essentially he was the Seeker. And he was seldom or never dogmatic. A friend of his, who professed to believe in transmigration, had once said of him, "I'm quite certain Malling must have been a sleuth-hound once." Now he wished to get on a trail.

But Mr. Harding, who on the previous day had been almost strangely frank about Henry Chichester, to-day had apparently no intention to be frank about himself. Though he had desired Malling's company, now that they were together alone he showed a reserve through which, Malling believed, he secretly wanted to break. But something held him back. He talked of politics, government and church, the spread of science, the follies of the day. And Malling got little nearer to him. But presently Malling happened to mention the modern craze for discussing intimately, or, as a Frenchwoman whom he knew expressed it, "avec un luxe de détail," matters of health.

"Yes, yes," responded Mr. Harding. "It is becoming almost objectionable, almost indecent. At the same time the health of the body is a very interesting subject because of its effect upon the mind, even, so it seems sometimes, upon the very nature of a man. Now I—" he struck the ash off the end of his cigar—"was, I might almost say, the victim of my stomach in the pulpit this morning."

"You were feeling ill?"

"Not exactly ill. I have a strong constitution. But I suffer at times from what the doctors call nervous dyspepsia. It is a very tiresome complaint, because it takes away for the time a man's confidence in himself, reduces him to the worm-level almost; and it gives him absurd ideas. Now this morning in the pulpit I had an attack of pain and uneasiness, and my nerve quite gave out. You must have noticed it."

"I saw that you were troubled by something."

"Something! It was that. My poor wife was thoroughly upset by it. You know how sensitive women are. To hold a crowd of people a man must be strong and well, in full possession of his powers. And I had a good subject."

"Splendid."

"I'll treat it again—treat it again."

The rector shifted in his chair.

"Do you think," he said after a pause, "that it is possible for another, an outsider, to know a man better than he knows himself?"

"In some cases, yes," answered Malling.

"But—as a rule?"

"There is the saying that outsiders see most of the game."

"Then why should we mind when all are subject to criticism!" exclaimed
Mr. Harding, forcibly.

Evidently he was startled by his own outburst, for instantly he set about to attenuate it.

"What I mean is that men ought not to care so much as most of them undoubtedly do what others think about them."

"It certainly is a sign of great weakness to care too much," said Malling. "But some people have a quite peculiar power of impressing their critical thoughts on others. These spread uneasiness around them like an atmosphere."

"I know, I know," said the rector, with an almost hungry eagerness. "Now surely one ought to keep out of such an atmosphere, to get out of it, and to keep out of it."

"Why not?"

"But—but—how extraordinary it is, the difficulty men have in getting away from things! Haven't you noticed that?"

"Want of moral strength," said Mailing, laconically.

"You think so?"

"Don't you?"

At this moment there was a knock at the door. Mr. Harding started.

"How impossible it is to get a quiet moment," he said with acute irritation. "Come in!" he called out.

The footman appeared.

"Mr. Chichester has called to see you, sir."

The rector's manner changed. He beckoned to the man to come into the room and to shut the door. The footman, looking surprised, obeyed.

"Where is he, Thomas?" asked Mr. Harding, in a lowered voice. "In the hall?"

"No, sir. As you were engaged I showed him up into the drawing-room."

"Oh, very well. Thank you. You can go."

The footman went out, still looking surprised.

Just as he was about to close the door his master said:

"Wait a moment!"

"Sir?"

"Was her ladyship in the drawing-room?"

"No, sir. Her ladyship is lying down in the boudoir."

"Ah. That will do."

The footman shut the door.

Directly he was gone the rector got up with an air of decision.

"Mr. Malling," he said, "perhaps I ought to apologize to you for treating you with the abruptness allowable in a friend, but surprising in an acquaintance, indeed in one who is almost a stranger. I do apologize. My only excuse is that I know you to be a man of exceptional trend of mind and unusual ability. I know this from Professor Stepton. But there's another thing. As I told you yesterday, you are the only person of my acquaintance who, having been fairly intimate with Henry Chichester, has not seen anything of him during the two years he has been with me as my coadjutor. Now what I want you to do is this: will you go upstairs and spend a few minutes alone with Chichester? Tell him I am detained, but am coming in a moment. I'll see to it that you are not interrupted. I'll explain to my wife. And, of course, I rely on you to make the matter appear natural to Chichester, not to rouse his—but I am sure you understand. Will you do this for me?"

"Certainly," said Malling, with his most prosaic manner. "Why not?"

"Why not? Exactly. There's nothing objectionable in the matter. But—" Mr. Harding's manner became very earnest, almost tragic. "I'll ask you one thing—afterward you will tell me the truth, exactly how Chichester impresses you now in comparison with the impression you got of him two years ago. You—you have no objection to promising to tell me?"

Malling hesitated.

"But is it quite fair to Chichester?" he said. "Suppose I obtained, for instance, a less favorable, or even an unfavorable impression of him now? You are his rector. I hardly think—"

The rector interrupted him.

"I'll leave it to you," he said. "Do just as you please. But, believe me,
I have a very strong reason for wishing to know your opinion. I need it.
I need it."

There was a lamentable sound in his voice.

"If I feel it is right I will give it to you," said Malling.

The rector opened the door of the study.

"You know your way?"

"Yes."

Malling went upstairs. Mr. Harding stood watching him from below till he disappeared.

III

When Malling opened the door of the drawing-room Chichester was standing by one of the windows, looking out into Onslow Gardens. He turned round, saw Malling, and uttered an exclamation.

"You are here!"

His light tenor voice sounded almost denunciatory, as if he had a right to demand an explanation of Malling's presence in Mr. Harding's house, and as he came away quickly from the window, he repeated, with still more emphasis:

"You are here!"

"Lunching—yes," replied Malling, imperturbably.

He looked at Chichester and smiled.

"You have no objection, I hope?"

His words and manner evidently brought the curate to a sense of his own unconventionality. He held out his hand.

"I beg your pardon. Your coming in surprised me. I had no idea"—his blue eyes went searchingly over Malling's calm face—"that you could be here. I thought you and the rector were complete strangers till I introduced you yesterday."

"So we were."

Malling sat down comfortably on a sofa. His action evidently recalled
Chichester's mind to the fact that he was to see the rector.

"Isn't the rector coming to see me?" he asked.

"Almost directly. He's busy for a few minutes. We were smoking together in his study."

"You seem to—you seem to have made great friends!" said Chichester, with a sort of forced jocularity.

"Great friends! They're hardly made in a moment. I happened to be at church this morning—"

"At church—where?" exclaimed the curate.

"At St. Joseph's. And Mr. Harding kindly asked me to lunch."

"You were at church at St. Joseph's this morning?" said Chichester.

He sat down by Malling and stared into his face.

"Did you—did you stay for the sermon?"

"Certainly. I came for the sermon. I had never heard Mr. Harding preach."

"No? No? Well, what did you think of it? What did you think of it?"

The curate spoke nervously, and seemed to Malling to be regarding him with furtive anxiety.

"It was obvious that Mr. Harding wasn't in good form this morning,"
Malling said. "He explained the matter after lunch."

"He explained the matter!" said Chichester, with a rising voice, in which there was an almost shrill note of suspicion.

"Yes. He told me he was often the victim of nervous dyspepsia, and that he had an attack of it while in the pulpit this morning."

"He told you it was nervous dyspepsia!"

"I have just said so."

The curate looked down.

"I advised him not to walk all the way home yesterday," he said gloomily.
"You heard me."

"You think it was that?"

"He never will take advice from any one. That's his—one of his great faults. Whatever he thinks, whatever he says, must be right. You, as a layman, probably have no idea how a certain type of clergyman loves authority."

This remark struck Malling as in such singularly bad taste—considering where they were, and that one of them was Mr. Harding's guest, the other his curate—that only his secret desire to make obscure things clear prevented him from resenting it.

"It is one of the curses of the Church," continued Chichester, "this passion for authority, for ruling, for having all men under one's feet as it were. If men would only listen, take advice, see themselves as they really are, how much finer, how much greater, they might become!"

"See themselves as others see them! Eh?" said Malling. "But do you mean that a rector should depend on his curate's advice rather than on his own judgment?"

"And why not?" said Chichester. "Rector—curate—archbishop—what does it matter? The point is not what rank in the hierarchy a man has, but what, and how, does he see? A street boy may perceive a truth that a king is blind to. At that moment the street boy is greater than the king. Do you deny it?"

"No," said Malling, amazed at the curate's excitement, but showing no astonishment.

"But it's a terrible thing to see too clearly!" continued Chichester, almost as if talking to himself, absorbed. "A terrible thing!"

He looked up at Malling, and almost solemnly he said:

"Are you still going on with all those investigations?"

"When I have any spare time, I often spend some of it in that sort of work," answered Malling, lightly.

It was his way to make light of his research work, and indeed he seldom mentioned it unless he was forced to do so.

"Do you think it is right?" said Chichester, earnestly.

"Right?"

"To strive to push one's way into hidden regions."

"If I didn't think it right I shouldn't do it," retorted Malling, but without heat.

"And—for clergymen?" questioned Chichester, leaning forward, and dropping his small, thin hands down between his knees.

"What do you mean?"

"Do you think it right for clergymen to indulge themselves—for it is indulgence—in investigations, in attempts to find out more than God has chosen to reveal to us?"

The man of science in Malling felt impatient with the man of faith in
Chichester.

"Does it never occur to you that the anima mundi may have hidden certain things from the minds of mortals just in order to provide them with a field to till?" he said, with a hint of sarcasm. "Wasn't the fact that the earth revolves round the sun, instead of the sun round the earth, hidden from every living creature till Galileo discovered it? Do you think Galileo deserved our censure?"

"Saul was punished for consulting the witch of Endor," returned Chichester. "And the Roman Catholic Church forbids her children to deal in occult things."

"You can't expect a man like me, a disciple of Stepton, to take the Roman
Catholic view of such a matter."

"You are not a clergyman," said Chichester.

Malling could not help smiling.

"You think the profession carries with it certain obligations," he said. "No doubt it does. But I shall never believe that one of them is to shut your eyes to any fact in the whole scheme of Creation. Harm can never come from truth."

"If I could believe that!" Chichester cried out.

"Do you mean to tell me you don't believe it?"

Chichester looked at Malling for quite a minute without replying. Then he got up, and said, with a changed voice and manner:

"If the rector doesn't come to see me I shall have to go. Sunday is not a holiday, you know, for us clergymen."

He drew out his watch and looked at it.

"I shall have to go. I'm taking the Children's Service."

Malling got up too.

"Is it getting late?" he said. "Perhaps—"

At this moment the door was gently opened and Mr. Harding appeared.

"Oh, Chichester," he said. "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting. What is it? Would you like to come to my study?"

"I must be off," said Malling. "May I say good-by to Lady Sophia? Or perhaps she is resting and would rather not be disturbed."

"I'm sure she would wish to say good-by to you," said the rector. "I'll just ask her."

He shot a quick glance from one man to the other and went out of the room, leaving the door open behind him.

Directly he was gone the curate said: "It has been such a pleasure to me to renew my acquaintance with you, Mr. Malling. Are you going to be long in London?"

"All the season, I think."

"Then I hope we may meet again soon, very soon."

He hesitated, put one hand in his pocket, and brought out a card-case.

"I should like to give you my address."

"And let me give you mine."

They exchanged cards.

"I expect you'll be very busy," said the curate, rather doubtfully.

Then he added, like a man urged on by some strong, almost overpowering desire to do a thing not quite natural to him:

"But I wish you could spare an evening to come to dine with me. I live very modestly, of course. I'm in rooms, in Hornton Street—do you know it?—near Campden Hill?—Number 4a—as you'll see on my card. I wonder—"

"I shall be delighted to come."

"When?"

"Whenever you are kind enough to ask me."

"Could you come on Wednesday week? It's so unfortunate, I have such a quantity of parish engagements—that is my first evening free."

"Wednesday week, with pleasure."

"At half after seven?"

"That will suit me perfectly."

"And"—he looked toward the door—"I shall be greatly obliged to you if you won't mention to the rector the fact that you are coming. He—"

"My wife's in the boudoir," said Mr. Harding, coming into the room at this moment.

He stood by the door.

Malling shook hands with Chichester, and went to say good-by to his hostess.

Mr. Harding shut the drawing-room door.

"This is the way," he said. "Well, Mr. Malling? Well?"

"You mean you want to know—?"

"Your impression of Chichester."

The rector stopped on the landing.

"Do you find him much changed?"

Malling shrugged his shoulders.

"Possibly—a little. He may have become rather firmer in manner, a trifle more decisive."

"Firmer! More decisive, you say!"

"But surely that is only natural, working—as he has done, I understand, under a man such as yourself for two years."

"Such as myself! Then you think he's caught something of my manner and way of looking at things? You think—"

"Really, it's difficult to say," interrupted Malling. "He's developed, no doubt. But very few people don't. I suppose you've trained him."

"I!" said the rector. "I train a man like Chichester!"

In his voice there was a bitter irony.

"Is that you, Mr. Malling?" said the voice of Lady Sophia. "I was lying down with a book. This is my little room."

She looked pale, almost haggard, as the sunshine fell upon her through the open window.

Malling took his leave at once and she did not attempt to detain him.

"I hope you'll come again," she said, as they shook hands. "Perhaps on another Sunday morning, to church and lunch. I'll let you know."

She said the last words with a significance which made Malling understand that she did not wish him to come to church at St. Joseph's again till she gave him the word.

The rector let him out of the house. Not another word was spoken about Henry Chichester. As his guest walked away the rector stood, bareheaded, looking after him, then, as Malling turned the corner of the gardens, with a heavy sigh, and the unconscious gesture of a man greatly troubled in mind, he stepped back into his hall and shut the door behind him.

IV

A week later, Mailing paid a visit to Professor Stepton. He had heard nothing of the Hardings and Chichester since the day of the luncheon in Onslow Gardens, but they had seldom been absent from his thoughts, and more than once he had looked at the words, "Dine with H.C." in his book of engagements, and had found himself wishing that "Hornton Street, Wednesday" was not so far distant.

The professor lived in Westminster, in a house with Adam ceilings, not far from the Houses of Parliament. He was unmarried, and Malling found him alone after dinner, writing busily in his crowded library. He had but recently returned from Paris, whither he had traveled to take part in a series of "sittings" with the famous medium, Mrs. Groeber.

In person the professor was odd, without being specially striking. He was of medium height, thin and sallow, with gray whiskers, thick gray hair, bushy eyebrows, and small, pointed and inquiring features which gave him rather the aspect of a prying bird. His eyes were little and sparkling. His mouth, strangely enough, was ecclesiastical. He nearly always wore very light-colored clothes. Even in winter he was often to be seen clad in yellow-gray tweeds, a yellow silk necktie, and a fawn-colored Homburg hat. And no human being had ever encountered him in a pair of boots unprotected by spats. One peculiarity of his was that he did not possess a walking-stick, another that he had never—so at least he declared—owned a pocket-handkerchief, having had no occasion to use one at any moment of his long and varied life. When it rained he sometimes carried an umbrella, generally shut. At other times he moved briskly along with his arms swinging at his sides.

As Malling came in he looked up and nodded.

"Putting down all about Mrs. Groeber," he observed.

"Anything new or interesting?" asked Malling.

"Just the usual manifestations, done in full light, though."

He laid aside his pen, while Malling sat down.

"A letter from Flammarion this morning," he said. "But all about Halley's comet, of course. What is it?"

Now the professor's "What is it?" was not general, but particular, and was at once understood to be so by Malling. It did not mean "Why have you come?" but "Why are you obsessed at this moment, and by what?"

"Let's have the mystery," he added, leaning his elbows on his just dried manuscript, and resting his sharp little chin on his doubled fists.

Yet Malling had hinted at no mystery, and had come without saying he was coming.

"You know a clergyman called Marcus Harding?" said Malling.

"Of St. Joseph's. To be sure, I do."

"Do you know also his senior curate, Henry Chichester?"

"No."

"Have you heard of him?"

"Oh dear, yes. And I fancy I've seen him at a distance."

"You heard of him from Harding, I suppose."

"Exactly, and Harding's wife."

"Oh, from Lady Sophia!"

"Who hates him."

"Since when?" said Malling, emphatically.

"I couldn't say. But I was only aware of the fact about a month ago."

"Have you any reason to suppose that Harding has been making any experiments?"

"In church music, biblical criticism, or what?"

"Say in psychical research?"

"No."

"Or that Chichester has?"

"No."

"Hasn't Harding ever talked to you on the subject?"

"He has tried to," said the professor, rather grimly.

"And you didn't encourage him?"

"When do I encourage clergymen to talk about psychical research?"

Malling could not help smiling.

"I have some reason—at least I believe so—to suppose that Harding and his curate Chichester have been making some experiments in directions not entirely unknown to us," he observed. "And what is more"—he paused—"what is more," he continued, "I am inclined to think that those experiments may have been crowned with a success they little understand."

Down went the professor's fists, his head was poked forward in Malling's direction, and his small eyes glittered almost like those of a glutton who sees a feast spread before him.

"The experiments of two clergymen in psychical research crowned with success!" he barked out.

"If so, I shall see what I can do in the pulpit—the Abbey pulpit!"

He got up, and walking slightly sidewise, with his hands hanging, and his fingers opening and shutting, went over to a chair close to Malling's.

"Get on!" he said.

"I'm going to. I want your advice."

When Malling had finished what he had to say, the professor, who had interrupted him two or three times to ask pertinent questions, put his hands on his knees and thrust his head forward.

"You said you wanted advice," he said. "What about?"

"I wish you to advise me how I had better proceed."

"You really think the matter important?" asked the professor.

Malling looked slightly disconcerted.

"You don't?" he said.

"You are deducing a great deal from not very much. That's certain," observed the professor.

"You never knew Chichester," retorted Malling. "I did—two years ago."

"Suppose you are right, suppose these two reverend gentlemen have done something such as you suppose—and that there has been a result, a curious result, what have we to do with it? Tell me that."

"You mean that I have no right to endeavor to make a secret investigation into the matter. But I'm positive both the men want help from me. I don't say either of them will ask it. But I'm certain both of them want it."

"Two clergymen!" said the professor. "Two clergymen! That's the best of it—if there is an it, which there may not be."

"Harding spoke very warmly of you."

"Good-believing man! Now, I do wonder what he's been up to. I do wonder. Perhaps he'd have told me but for my confounded habit of sarcasm, my way of repelling the amateur—repelling!" His arms flew out. "There's so much silliness beyond all bearing, credulity beyond all the patience of science. Table-turning women, feminine men! 'The spirits guide me, Professor, in every smallest action of my life!'—Wuff!—the charlatan battens and breeds. And the bile rises in one till Carlyle on his worst day might have hailed one as a brother bilious, and so denunciatory—Jeremiah nervously dyspeptic! And when you opened your envelop and drew out a couple of clergymen, really, really! But perhaps I was in a hurry! Clergymen in a serious fix, too, because of unexpected and not understood success! And I talk of repelling the amateur!"

Suddenly he paused and, with his bushy eyebrows twitching, looked steadily at Malling.

"I leave it to you," he said. "Take your own line. But don't forget that, if there's anything in it, development will take place in the link. The link will be a center of combat. The link will be an interesting field for study."

"The link?" said Malling, interrogatively.

"Goodness gracious me! Her ladyship! Her ladyship!" cried out the professor. "What are you about, Malling?"

And he refused to say another word on the matter till Malling, after much more conversation on other topics, got up to go. Then, accompanying him to the front door, the professor said:

"You know I think it's probably all great nonsense."

"What?"

"Your two black-coated friends. You bustle along at such a pace. Remember, I have made more experiments than you have, and I have never come upon an exactly similar case. I don't know whether such a thing can be. No more do you—you've guessed. Now, guessing is not at all scientific. At the same time you've proved you can be patient. If there is anything in this it's profoundly interesting, of course."

"Then you advise me—?"

"If in doubt, study Lady Sophia. Good night."

As Malling went away into the darkness he heard the professor snapping out to himself, as he stood before his house bareheaded:

"Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings! Très bien! But—reverend gentlemen of St. Joseph's! I shall have to look for telergic power in my acquaintance Randall Cantuar, when I want it! By Jove!"

"If in doubt, study Lady Sophia." As Malling thought over these parting words, he realized their wisdom and wondered at his own short-sightedness.

He had sent his cards to Onslow Gardens after the luncheon with the Hardings. He wished now he had called and asked for Lady Sophia. But doubtless he would have an opportunity of being with her again. If she did not offer him one, he would make one for himself.

He longed to see her with Henry Chichester.

During the days that elapsed before "Hornton Street, Wednesday" he considered a certain matter with sedulous care. His interview with Stepton had not been fruitless. Stepton always made an effect on his mind. Casual and jerky though his manner was, obstinate as were his silences at certain moments, fragmentary as was his speech, he had a way of darting at the essential that set him apart from most men. Malling remembered a horrible thing he had once seen in the Sahara, a running gazelle killed by a falcon. The falcon, rising high in the blue air, had followed the gazelle, had circled, poised, then shot down and, with miraculous skill, struck into the gazelle's eye. Unerringly from above it had chosen out of the vast desert the home for its cruel beak. Somewhat in similar fashion, so Malling thought, Stepton rose above things, circled, poised, sank, and struck into the heart of the truth unerringly.

Perhaps he was able to do this because he was able to mount, falconwise!

Malling would have given a good deal to have Stepton with him in this affair, despite the professor's repellent attitude toward the amateur. Well, if there really was anything in it, if strangeness rose out of the orthodox bosom of St. Joseph's, if he—Malling—found himself walking in thick darkness, he meant to bring Stepton into the matter, whether at Stepton's desire or against it. Meanwhile he would see if there was enlightenment in Hornton Street.

On the Wednesday the spell of fine weather which had made London look strangely vivacious broke up, and in the evening rain fell with a gentle persistence. Blank grayness took the town. A breath as of deep autumn was in the air. And the strange sadness of cities, which is like no other sadness, held the spirit of Evelyn Malling as he walked under an umbrella in the direction of Kensington High Street. He walked, to shake off depression. But in his effort he did not succeed. All that he saw deepened his melancholy; the soldiers starting out vaguely from barracks, not knowing what to do, but free for a time, and hoping, a little heavily, for some adventure to break the military monotony of their lives; the shopgirls, also in hope of something to "take them out of themselves"—pathetic desire of escape from the little prison, where the soul sits, picking its oakum sometimes, in its cell of flesh!—young men making for the parks, workmen for the public houses, an old woman, in a cap, peering out of an upper window in Prince's Gate; Italians with an organ, and a monkey that looked as if it were dying of nostalgia; women hurrying—whither?—with anxious faces, and bodies whose very shapes, and whose every movement, suggested, rather proclaimed, worry.

Malling knew it was the rain, the possessive grayness, which troubled his body to-night, and through his body troubled his spirit. His nostrils inhaled the damp, and it seemed to go straight into his essence, into the mystery that was he. His eyes saw no more blue, and it was as if they drew a black shutter over all the blue in his heart, blotting it out. People became doomed phantoms, because the weather had changed and because London knows how to play Cassandra to the spirit of many a man. To Malling, as he presently turned to the right, Hornton Street looked like an alley leading straight to the pit of despair, and when he tapped on the blistered green door of the small house where the curate lived, it was as if he tapped seeking admittance to all the sorrowful things that had been brought into being to beset his life with blackness.

A neat servant-girl opened the door. There was a smell of roast mutton in the passage. So far well. Malling took off his hat and coat, hung them up on a hook indicated by the plump red hand of the maid, and then followed her upstairs. The curate was in possession of the first floor.

Malling knew that it would be a case of folding-doors and perhaps of curtains of imitation lace. It was a case of folding-doors. But there was a dull green hue on the walls that surely bespoke Henry Chichester's personal taste. There were bookcases, there were mezzotints, there were engravings of well-known pictures, and there were armchairs not covered with horsehair. There was also a cottage piano, severely nude. In the center of the room stood a small square table covered with a cloth and laid for two persons.

"I'll tell Mr. Chichester, sir."

The maid went out. From behind the folding-doors came to Malling's ears the sound of splashing water, then a voice saying, certainly to the maid, "Thank you, Ellen, I will come." And in three minutes Chichester was in the room, apologizing.

"I was kept late in the parish. There's a good deal to do."

"You're not overworked?" asked Malling.

"Do I look so?" said Chichester, quickly.

He turned round and gazed at himself in an oval Venetian mirror which was fixed to the wall just behind him. His manner for a moment was oddly absorbed as he examined his face.

"London life tells on one, I suppose," he said, again turning. "We change, of course, in appearance as we go on."

His blue eyes seemed to be seeking something in Malling's impenetrable face.

"Do you think," he said, "I am much altered since we used to meet two years ago? It would of course be natural enough if I were."

Malling looked at him for a minute steadily.

"In appearance, you mean?"

"Of course."

"To-night it seems to me that you have altered a good deal."

"To-night?" said the curate, as if with anxiety.

"If there is any change,—and I think there is,—it seems to me more apparent to-night than it was when I saw you the other day."

Ellen, the maid, entered the room bearing a tray on which was a soup-tureen.

"Oh, dinner!" said Chichester. "Let us sit down. You won't mind simple fare, I hope. We are having soup, mutton,—I am not sure what else."

"Stewed fruit, sir," interpolated Ellen.

"To be sure! Stewed fruit and custard. Open the claret, Ellen, please."

"Have you been in these rooms long?" asked Malling, as they unfolded their napkins.

"Two years. All the time I have been at St. Joseph's. The rector told me of them. The curate who preceded me had occupied them."

"What became of him?"

"He has a living in Northampton now. But when he left he had nothing in view."

"He was tired of work at St. Joseph's?"

"I don't think he got on with the rector."

The drip of the rain became audible outside, and a faint sound of footsteps on the pavement.

"Possibly I shall not stay much longer," he added.

"No doubt you'll take a living."

"I don't know. I don't know. But, in any case, I may not stay much longer—perhaps. That will do, Ellen; you may go and fetch the mutton. Put the claret on the table, please."

When the maid was gone, he added:

"One doesn't want a servant in the room listening to all one says. As she was standing behind me I had forgotten she was here. How it rains to-night! I hate the sound of rain."

"It is dismal," said Malling, thinking of his depression while he had walked to Hornton Street.

"Do you mind," said the curate, slightly lowering his voice, "if I speak rather—rather confidentially to you?"

"Not at all, if you wish to—"

"Well, now, you are a man of the world, you've seen many people. I wish you would tell me something."

"What is it?"

Ellen appeared with the mutton. As soon as she had put it on the table and departed, Chichester continued:

"How does Mr. Harding strike you? What impression does he make upon you?"

Eagerness, even more, something that was surely anxiety, shone in his eyes as he asked the question.

"He's a very agreeable man."

"Of course, of course! Would you say he was a man to have much power over others, his fellow-men?"

"Speaking quite confidentially—"

"Nothing you say shall ever go beyond us two."

"Then—I don't know that I should."

"He doesn't strike you as a man of power?"

"In the pulpit?"

"And out of it—especially out of it?"

"He may have been. But—perhaps he has lost in power. Dispersion, you know, does not make for strength."

Suddenly the curate became very pale.

"Dispersion—you say!" he almost stammered.

As if to cover some emotion, he looked at Malling's plate, and added:

"Have some more? You won't? Then—"

He got up and rang the bell. Ellen reappeared, cleared away, and put the stewed fruit and custard on the table.

"Bring the coffee in ten minutes, Ellen. I won't ring."

"Very well, sir."

"Dispersion," said Chichester to Malling in a firmer voice, as Ellen disappeared.

"Concentration makes for strength. Mr. Harding seems to me mentally—what shall I say?—rather torn in pieces, as if preyed upon by some anxiety. Now, if you'll allow me to be personal, I should say that you have greatly gained in strength and power since I knew you two years ago."

"You—you observe a difference?" asked Chichester, apparently in great perturbation.

"A striking difference."

"And—and would you say I looked a happier, as well as a—a stronger man?"

"I couldn't with truth say that."

"Very few of us are happy," said Chichester, with trembling lips. "Poor miserable sinners as we are! And we clergymen, who set up to direct others—" he broke off.

He seemed greatly, strangely, moved.

"You must forgive me. I have had a very hard day's work!" he murmured. "The coffee will do me good. Let us sit in the armchairs, and Ellen can clear away. I wish I had two sitting-rooms."

He rang to make Ellen hurry. Till she came Malling talked about Italian pictures and looked at the curate's books. When she had cleared away, left the coffee, and finally departed, he sat down with an air of satisfaction. Chichester did not smoke, but begged Malling to light up, and gave him a cigar.

"Coffee always does one good," he said. "It acts directly on the heart, and seems to strengthen the whole body. I have had a trying day."

"You look tired," said Malling.

The fact was that Chichester had never recovered the color he had so suddenly lost when they were discussing Mr. Harding.

"It's no wonder if I do," rejoined Chichester, in a voice that sounded hopeless.

He drank some coffee, seemed to make a strong effort to recover himself, and, with more energy, said:

"I asked you here because I wanted to renew a pleasant acquaintanceship, but also—you won't think me discourteous, I know—because—well, I had a purpose in begging you to come."

"Won't you tell me what it is?"

The curate shifted in his armchair, clasped and unclasped his hands. A mental struggle was evidently going on within him. Indeed, during the whole evening Malling had received from him a strong impression of combat, of confusion.

"I wanted to continue the discussion we began at Mr. Harding's the other day. You remember, I asked you not to tell him you were coming?"

"Yes."

"I think it's best to keep certain matters private. People so easily misunderstand one. And the rector has rather a jealous nature."

Malling looked at his companion without speaking. At this moment he was so strongly interested that he simply forgot to speak. Never, even at a successful sitting when, the possibility of trickery having been eliminated, a hitherto hidden truth seemed about to lift a torch in the darkness and to illumine an unknown world, had he been more absorbed by the matter in hand. Chichester did not seem to be struck by his silence, and continued:

"And then not every one is fitted to comprehend properly certain matters, to see things in their true light. Now the other day you said a thing that greatly impressed me, that I have never been able to get out of my mind since. You said, 'Harm can never come from truth.' I have been thinking about those words of yours, night and day, night and day. Tell me—did you mean them?"

The question came from Chichester's lips with such force that Malling was almost startled.

"Certainly I meant them," he answered.

"And if truth slays?"

"And is death the worst thing that can happen to a man, or to an idea—some wretched fallacy, perhaps, that has governed the minds of men, some gross superstition, some lie that darkens counsel?"

"You think if a man lives by a lie he is better dead?"

"Don't you think so?"

"But don't we all need a crutch to help us along on the path of life?"

"What! You, a clergyman, think that it is good to bolster up truth with lies?" said Malling, with genuine scorn.

"I didn't say that."

"You implied it, I think."

"Perhaps if you had worked among men and women as much as I have you would know how much they need. If you went abroad, say to Italy, and saw how the poor, ignorant people live happily oftentimes by their blind belief in the efficacy of the saints, would you wish to tear it from them?"

"I think we should live by the truth, and I would gladly strike away a lie from any human being who was using it as a crutch."

"I thought that once," said Chichester.

The words were ordinary enough, but there was something either in the way they were said, or in Chichester's face as he said them, that made Malling turn cold.

To cover his unusual emotion, which he was ashamed of, and which he greatly desired to hide from his companion, he blew out a puff of cigar smoke, lifted his cup, and drank the rest of his coffee.

"May I have another cup?" he said. "It's excellent."

The coffee-pot was on the table. Chichester poured out some more.

"I will have another cup, too," he said. "How it wakes up the mind."

He glanced at Mailing and added:

"Almost terribly sometimes."

"Yes. But—going back to our subject—don't you still think that men should live by the truth?"

"I think," began Chichester—"I think—"

It seemed as if something physical prevented him from continuing. He swallowed, as if forcing something down his throat.

"I think," he got out at last, "that few men know how terrible the face of truth can be."

His own countenance was contorted as he spoke, as if he were regarding something frightful.

"I think"—he turned right round in his chair to confront Malling squarely—"that you do not know."

For the first time he completely dominated Malling, Chichester the gentle, cherubic clergyman, whom Malling had thought of as good, but weak, and certainly as a negligible quantity. He dominated, because at that moment he made Malling feel as if he had some great possession of knowledge which Malling lacked.

"And you?" said Malling. "Do you know?"

The curate's lips worked, but he made no answer.

Malling was aware of a great struggle in his mind, as of a combat in which two forces were engaged. He got up, walked to the window, and stood as if listening to the rain.

"If only Stepton were here!" thought Malling.

There was a truth hidden from him, perhaps partly divined, obscurely half seen, but not thoroughly understood, as a whole invisible. Stepton would be the man to elucidate it, Malling thought. It lured him on, and baffled him.

"How it rains!" said the curate at last, without turning.

He bent down and opened the small window. The uneasy, almost sinister noise of rain in darkness entered the room, with the soft smell of moisture.

"Do you mind if we have a little air?" he added.

"I should like it," said Malling.

Chichester came back and sat down again opposite Malling. His expression had now quite changed. He looked calmer, gentler, weaker, and much more uninteresting. Crossing his legs, and folding his thin hands on his knees, he began to talk in his light tenor voice. And he kept the conversation going on church music, sacred art in Italy, and other eminently safe and respectable topics till it was time for Malling to go.

Only when he was letting his guest out into the night did he seem troubled once more. He clasped Malling's hand in his, as if almost unaware that he was doing so, and said with some hesitation:

"Are you—are you going to see the rector again?"

"Not that I know of," said Malling, speaking the strict truth, and virtually telling a lie at the same time.

For he was determined, if possible, to see Mr. Harding, and that before very long.

"If I may say so," Chichester said, shifting from one foot to another and looking down at the rain-sodden pavement, "I wouldn't see him."

"May I ask you why?"

"You may get a wrong impression. Two years ago he was another man. Strangers, of course, may not know it, not realize it. But we who have lived with him do know it. Mr. Harding is going down the hill."

There was a note of deep sadness in his voice. Had he been speaking of himself, of his own decadence, his tone could scarcely have been more melancholy.

And for long Malling remembered the look in his eyes as he drew back to shut his door.

In the rain Malling walked home as he had come. But now it was deep in the night and his depression had deepened. He was a self-reliant man, and not easily felt himself small, though he was not conceited. To-night he felt diminished. The worm-sensation overcame him. That such a man as Chichester should have been able to convey to him such a sensation was strange, yet it was from Chichester that this mental chastisement had come. For a moment Chichester had towered, and at that moment Malling surely had dwindled, shrunk together, like a sheet of paper exposed to the heat of a flame.

But that Chichester should have had such an effect on him—Malling!

If Mr. Harding was going down the hill, Chichester surely was not. He had changed drastically since Malling had known him two years ago. In power, in force, he had gained. He now conveyed the impression of a man capable, if he chose, of imposing himself on others. Formerly he had been the wax that receives the impress. But whereas formerly he had been a contented man, obviously at peace with himself and with the world, now he was haunted by some great anxiety, by some strange grief, or perhaps even by some fear.

"Few men know how terrible the face of the truth can be."

Chichester had said that.

Was he one of the few men?

And was that why now, as Malling walked home in the darkness and rain, he felt himself humbled, diminished?

For Malling loved knowledge and thought men should live by it. Had truth a Medusa face, still would he have desired to look into it once, would have been ready to endure a subsequent turning to stone.

That Chichester should perhaps have seen what he had not seen—that troubled him, even humbled him.

Some words of Professor Stepton came back to his mind: "If there's anything in it, development will take place in the link." And those last words: "If in doubt, study Lady Sophia."

Mailing was in doubt. Why not follow Stepton's advice? Why not study Lady
Sophia?

He resolved to do it. And with the resolve came to him a sense of greater well-being. The worm-sensation departed from him. He lifted his head and walked more briskly.

V

On the night following the dinner in Hornton Street, Malling went to the Covent Garden Opera House to hear "La Traviata." The well-worn work did not grasp the attention of a man who was genuinely fond of the music of Richard Strauss, with its almost miraculous intricacies, and who was willingly captive to Debussy. He looked about the house from his stall, and very soon caught sight of Lady Mansford, Lady Sophia's sister-in-law, in a box on the Grand Tier. Malling knew Lady Mansford. He resolved to pay her a visit, and as soon as the curtain was down, and Tetrazzini had tripped before it, smiling not unlike a good-natured child, he made his way upstairs, and asked the attendant to tap at a door on which was printed, "The Earl of Mansford." The man did so, and opened the door, showing a domestic scene highly creditable to the much maligned British aristocracy—Lord Mansford seated alone with his wife, in evidently amicable conversation.

After a few polite words he made Malling sit down beside her, and, saying he would have a cigarette in the foyer, he left them together.

Lady Mansford was a pretty, dark woman, of the slightly irresponsible and little-bird type. She willingly turned her charmingly dressed head and chirped when noticed, and she was generally noticed because of her beauty. Now she chirped of Ceylon, where Malling had been, and then, more vivaciously, of Parisian milliners, where she had been. From these allied subjects Malling led her on to a slightly different topic—religion.

"I went to St. Joseph's last Sunday week," he presently said.

"St. who—what?" said Lady Mansford, who was busy with her opera-glasses, and had just noticed that Lady Sindon, a bird-like rival of hers, had changed the color of her hair, fortunately to her—Lady Sindon's—disadvantage.

"To St. Joseph's, to hear your brother-in-law preach."

"It doesn't do at all," murmured Lady Mansford. "It makes her look
Chinese."

"You said—?"

"Mollie Sindon. But what were you talking about? Do tell me." She laid down her glasses.

"I was saying that I went to church last Sunday week."

"Why?"

"To hear your brother-in-law preach at St. Joseph's."

"Marcus!" exclaimed Lady Mansford.

She pursed her lips.

"I don't go to St. Joseph's. Poor Sophy! I'm sorry for her."

"I lunched with Lady Sophia after the service."

"Did you? Isn't it sad?"

"Sad! I don't quite understand?" said Malling, interrogatively.

"The change in him. Of course people say it's drink. Such nonsense! But they must say something, mustn't they?"

"Is Mr. Harding so very much changed?"

"Do you mean to say you didn't notice it?"

"I never met him till within the last fortnight."

"He's transformed—simply. He might have risen to anything, with his energy, his ambition, and his connections. And now! But the worst of it is no one can make out why it is. Even Sophia and Isinglass—my husband, you know!—haven't an idea. And it gets worse every day. Last Sunday I hear his sermon was too awful, a mere muddle of adjectives, such as one hears in Hyde Park, I believe. I never liked Marcus particularly. I always thought him too autocratic, too determined to dominate. He had that poor little Mr. Chichester—his curate—completely under his thumb. Mr. Chichester couldn't call his soul his own. He worshiped Marcus. But now they say even he is beginning to think that his god is of clay. What can it be? Do you think Marcus is losing his mind?"

"Oh, I should hope not," returned Malling, vaguely. "Has it been going on long?"

"Oh, for quite a time. But it all seemed to come on gradually—as things do, you know! Poor Sophy has always adored him, and given way to him in everything. In her eyes all that he does is right. She never says a word, I believe, but she must be suffering the tortures of—you know! There's Winnie Rufford coming in! How astonishingly young she looks. Were you at the Huntingham's ball? Well—"

Lady Mansford twittered no more about the Harding menage. But Malling felt that his visit had not been fruitless.

After the opera he went to a party in Grosvenor Street where again he managed to produce talk of the Hardings. It seemed that Lady Mansford had not exaggerated very much. Among those who knew the Hardings a change in the rector of St. Joseph's had evidently been generally noticed. Malling took in to supper a Mrs. Armitage, a great friend of Lady Sophia's, and she made no secret of the fact that Lady Sophia was greatly distressed.

"I thought she would have been here to-night," Mrs. Armitage said. "But she isn't. I suppose she felt she couldn't face it. So many of his congregation are here, or so many who were in his congregation."

"The church was crammed to the doors last Sunday week when he preached," observed Malling.

"Was it? Curiosity, I suppose. It certainly can't have been the intellectual merit of the sermon. I heard it was quite deplorable. But last Sunday's, I was told, was worse still. No continuity at all, and the church not full. People say the curate, Mr. Chichester, who often preaches in the evening, is making a great effect, completely cutting out his rector. And he used to be almost unbearably dull."

"Will you have a quail?"

"Please. You might give me two. My doctor says if I sit up late—thank you!"

"I've never heard Mr. Chichester preach," said Malling.

"He seems to have come on marvelously, to be quite another man."

"Quite another man, does he?"

"Yes. It's very trying for the Hardings naturally. If it continues I think there will have to be a change. I don't think things can go on as they are. My friend Sophia won't be able to stand it."

"You mean—the contrast?"

"Between her husband and Mr. Chichester. She's very highly strung and quite worships her husband; though, between you and me, I think rather in the slave spirit. But some women are like that. They can't admire a man unless he beats them. Not that Mr. Harding ever dreamed of doing such a thing to Sophia, of course. But his will had to be law in everything. You know the type of man! It's scarcely my idea of what a clergyman should be. I think a man who professes to direct the souls of others should be more gentle and unselfish, especially to his wife. Another quail? Well, really, I think perhaps I will. They are so absurdly small this season, aren't they? There's scarcely anything on them."

So that minute fraction of the world that knew of the existence of the Hardings began to utter itself concerning them, and Malling was fortified in his original belief which he had expressed to Professor Stepton.

Among his many experiments made in connection with psychical research those which had interested him the most had been those in which the mystery of the human will had seemed to be deeply involved. Malling was essentially a psychologist. And man was to him the great mystery, because man contained surely something that belonged to, that was lent to, man, as it were, by another, the mind beyond, the anima mundi. When Malling drew mentally, or spiritually, very near to any man, however rude, however humble, he always had the feeling that he was approaching holy ground. Hidden beneath his generally imperturbable exterior, sunk beneath the surface incredulity of his mind, there was the deep sense of mighty truths waiting the appointed day of proclamation. Surely, he often thought, if there is God in anything, in the last rays of the sunset, in the silence of night upon the sea, in the waking of spring among the forests and the gardens, in the song of the nightingale which knows not lovers are listening, there is God in the will of man.

And when he made investigations into the action of will upon will, or of will—as it seemed—upon matter, he was held, as he was not held by the appearance of so-called spirit faces and spirit forms, even when he could not connect these with trickery which he knew how to expose. Perhaps, however, his incredulity in regard to these latter phenomena was incurable, though he did not know it. For he knew nearly all the devices of the charlatans. And when the so-called spirits came, the medium was always entranced, that is, apparently will-less, and so to Malling not interesting.

Now, from what Harding and Chichester had said to him, and from what he had observed for himself, Malling believed that the two clergymen must have had sittings together, probably with the usual tremendous object of the ignorant amateur, that merely of communicating with the other world. Considering who the two men were, Malling believed that in all probability they had sat alone and in secret. He also felt little doubt that from Mr. Harding's brain had come the suggestion of these practices, that his will had led Chichester on to them. Although he had not known the rector two years ago, he had gathered sufficient testimony to the fact that he had been a man of powerful, even perhaps of tyrannical, temperament, formed rather to rule than to be ruled. He knew that Chichester, on the contrary, had been gentle, kindly, yielding, and of somewhat weak, though of very amiable, nature. The physique of the two men accorded with these former temperaments. Harding's commanding height, large frame, big, powerful face and head, rather hard gray eyes, even his large white teeth, his bony, determined hands, his firmly treading feet, suggested force, a dominating will, the capacity, and the intention, to rule. Henry Chichester's fleshly envelop, on the other hand, cherubic, fair, and delicate, his blue eyes, small bones, the shape of forehead and chin, the line of the lips, hinted at—surely more than that, surely stated mildly—the existence within it of a nature retiring, meek, and ready to be ruled by others. No wonder if Chichester had been, as Lady Mansford had said, completely under the rector's thumb, no wonder if he had been unable to "call his soul his own" and had "worshiped Marcus."

Yes, if there had been these secret sittings by these two men, it was Harding who had persuaded Chichester to take part in them. And what had these sittings led to, what had been their result?

The ignorant outsider, the hastily skeptical, of course would say that there could have been no result. Malling, knowing more, knew better. He had seen strange cases of temporary confusion of a man's will brought about by sittings, of what had seemed temporary change even of a man's nature. When a hitherto sane man goes mad he often becomes the opposite of what he was. Those whom he formerly loved he specially singles out for hatred. That which he delighted to do he shrinks from with horror. Once good-natured, he is now of an evil temper, once gentle, he is fiercely obstinate, once gay, he cowers and weeps. So Malling had known a man, while retaining his sanity, to be transformed by the apparently trivial fact of sitting at a table with a friend, and placing his hands upon it with the hands of another man. He himself had sat with an Oxford friend,—who in later sittings became entranced,—and at the very first experiment this man had said to him, "It's so strange, now that I am sitting with you like this I feel filled with hatred toward you." This hatred, which had come upon this man at every successive sitting, had always faded away when the sitting was over. But was it certain that the feelings generated in sittings never persisted after they were broken up? Was it certain that in every case the waters that had been mysteriously troubled settled into their former stillness?

Harding and Chichester, for instance! Had the strong man troubled the waters of the weaker man's soul, and were those waters still agitated? That was perhaps possible. But Malling thought it was possible also, and he had suggested this to Professor Stepton, that the weaker man had infused some of his weakness, his self-doubtings, his readiness to be affected by the opinion of others, into his dominating companion. Malling believed it possible that the wills of the two clergymen, in some mysterious and inexplicable way, had mingled during their sittings, and that they had never become completely disentangled. If this were so, the result was a different Harding from the former Harding, and a different Henry Chichester from the former Henry Chichester.

What puzzled Malling, however, was the fact, if fact it were, that the difference in each man was not diminishing, but increasing.

Could they be continuing the sittings, if there had ever been sittings? All was surmise. As the professor had said, he, Malling, was perhaps deducing a good deal from very little. And yet was he? His instinct told him he was not. Yet there might no doubt be some ordinary cause for the change in Mr. Harding. Some vice, such as love of drink, or morphia, something that disintegrates a man, might have laid its claw upon him. That was possible. What seemed to Malling much more unaccountable was the extraordinary change in the direction of strength in Chichester. And the relations between the two men, if indeed the curate had once worshiped his rector, were mysteriously transformed. For now, was it not almost as if something of Harding in Chichester watched, criticized, Chichester in Harding?

But now—to study Lady Sophia! For if there was really anything in Malling's curious supposition, the woman must certainly be strangely affected. He remembered the expression in her eyes when her husband was preaching, her manner when she spoke of the curate as one of her husband's swans.

And he longed to see her again. She had said that she hoped he would come again to St. Joseph's and to her house, but he knew well that any such desire in her had arisen from her wounded pride in her husband. She wished Malling to know what the rector could really do. When she thought that the rector had recovered his former powers, his hold upon the minds of men, then she would invite Malling to return to St. Joseph's, but not before.

And when would that moment come?

It might not come for weeks, for months. It might never come. Malling did not mean to await it. Nevertheless he did not want to do anything likely to surprise Lady Sophia, to lead her to think that he had any special object in view in furthering his acquaintance with her.

While he was casting about in his mind what course to take, chance favored him.

Four days later, when he was strolling round the rooms in Burlington House, he saw not far in front of him the tall and restless figure of a woman. She was alone. For some time Malling did not recognize her. She did not turn sufficiently for him to see her face, and her almost feverish movements, though they attracted and fixed his attention, did not strike him as familiar. His thought of her, as he slowly followed in the direction she was taking, was, "What a difficult woman that would be to live with!" For the hands were never still; the gait was uneasy; nervousness, almost a sort of pitiful irritation, seemed expressed by her every movement.

In the big room this woman paused before the picture of the year, which happened to be a very bad one, and Malling, coming up, at last recognized her as Lady Sophia Harding.

He took off his hat. She seemed startled, but greeted him pleasantly, and entered into a discussion of the demerits which fascinate the crowd.

"You prefer seeing pictures alone, perhaps?" said Malling, presently.

"Indeed I don't," she answered. "I was coming to-day with my husband. We drove up together. But at the last moment he thought he remembered something,—some appointment with Mr. Chichester,—and left me."

There were irony and bitterness in her voice.

"He said he'd come back and meet me in the tea-room presently," she added.

"Shall we go there and wait for him?" asked Malling.

"But I'm afraid I'm taking up your time."

"I have no engagements this afternoon. I shall enjoy a quiet talk with you."

"It's very good of you."

They descended, and sat down in a quiet corner. In the distance a few respectable persons were slowly eating bath-buns with an air of fashion, their duly marked catalogues laid beside them on marble.

Far-off waiters, standing with their knees bent, conversed in undertones. A sort of subterranean depression, peculiar to this fastness of Burlington House, brooded over the china and the provisions.

"It reminds me of the British Museum tearoom," said Lady Sophia. "Here is tea! What a mercy! Modern pictures sap one's little strength."

She looked haggard, and was obviously on the edge of her nerves.

"Marcus might have come in," she added. "But of course he wouldn't—or couldn't."

"Doesn't he care for pictures?"

She slightly shrugged her shoulders.

"He used to. But I don't know that he does now."

"I suppose he has a tremendous amount to do."

"He used to do much more at Liverpool. If a man wishes to come to the front he mustn't sit in an armchair with folded hands."

There was a sharp sound of criticism in her voice which astonished Malling. At the luncheon, only about a fortnight ago, she had shown herself plainly as the adoring wife, anxious for her husband's success, nervously hostile to any one who interfered with it, who stood between him and the homage of his world. Now Malling noted, or thought he noted, a change in her mental attitude. He was instantly on the alert.

"I'm sure that's the last thing Mr. Harding would do," he said.

She shot a glance at him out of her discontented dark eyes.

"Are you?" she said.

And sarcasm crept in the words. She gave to Malling at this moment the impression of a woman so strung up as to be not her natural self, so tormented by some feeling, perhaps long repressed, that her temperament was almost furiously seeking an outlet, knowing instinctively, perhaps, that only there lay its salvation.

"His record proves it," said Malling, with serenely smiling assurance.

Lady Sophia twisted her lips. The Academy tea was very strong. Perhaps it had been standing. She drank a little, pulled at her long gloves restlessly, and looked at Malling. He knew she was longing to confide in somebody. If only he could induce her to confide in him!

"Oh, my husband's been a very active man," she said. "Everybody knows that. But in this modern world of ours one must not walk, or even run along, one must keep on rushing along if one intends to reach the goal."

"And by that you mean—?"

"Mean! The topmost height of your profession, or business, of whatever career you are in."

"You are ambitious," he said.

"Not for myself," she answered quickly. "I have no ambition for myself."

"But perhaps the ambition to spur on another successfully? That seems to me the truest, the most legitimate ambition of the woman all men worship in their hearts."

Suddenly tears started into her eyes. She was sitting opposite Malling, the tea-table between them. Now she leaned forward across it. By nature she was very sensitive, but she was not a self-conscious, woman. She was not self-conscious now.

"It is much better to be selfish," she said earnestly. "That is where we women make such a fatal mistake. Instead of trusting to ourselves, of relying on ourselves, and of having a personal ambition, we seek always another in whom we may trust; we are unhappy till we rely on another; it is for another we cherish, we hug, ambition. And then, when all founders, we realize too late what I dare say every man knows."

"What is that?"

"That we women are fools—fools!"

"For being unselfish?"

"For thinking we have power when we are impotent."

She made a gesture that was surely one of despair.

"No one—at any rate, no woman—has power for another," she added, with
almost terrible conviction. "That is all a legend, made up to please us,
I suppose. We draw a sword against darkness and think we are fighting.
Isn't it too absurd?"

With the last words she changed her tone, trying to make it light, and she smiled.

"We take everything too seriously. That's the trouble!" she said. "And men pretend we take nothing seriously."

"Very often they don't understand."

"Oh, please say never!" she exclaimed. "They never understand."

Suddenly Malling resolved on a very bold stroke.

"But I'm a man," he said, as if that obvious fact shattered her contention.

"What has that got to do with it?" she said, in obvious surprise.

"Because I do not understand."

For a moment she was silent. He thought he read what was passing through her mind, as he knew he had read her character. She was one of those women who must be proud of their men, who love to be ruled, but only by a conqueror, who delight to sink themselves, but in power, not in impotence. And now she was confronted by the shipwreck not merely of her hopes, but also of her belief. She saw a hulk drifting at the mercy of the waves that, perhaps, would soon engulf it. But she was not only despairing, she was raging too. For she was a woman with nervous force in her, and it is force that rages in the moments of despair, seeking, perhaps unconsciously, some means of action and finding none.

"Why should there not be some hope?" asked Malling, quietly.

"To-morrow is Sunday. If you go to morning church at St. Joseph's, and then to evening church, you will see if there is any hope."

"To evening church?"

"Yes, yes."

She got up.

"You are going?"

"I must. Forgive me!"

She held out her hand.

"But—"

"No, don't come with me, please."

"If I go to St. Joseph's to-morrow, afterward may I see you again?"

"If you think it's worth while."

Her face twisted. Hastily she pulled down her veil, turned away and left him.

VI

Malling went the next day to morning and evening service at St. Joseph's. He was not invited to lunch in Onslow Gardens, and he did not see Lady Sophia. On the whole, he was glad of this. He had enough to keep in his mind that day. The matter in which he was interested seemed growing before his eyes, like a thing coming out of the earth, but now beginning to thrust itself up into regions where perhaps it would eventually be hidden in darkness, with the great company of mysteries whose unraveling is beyond the capacity of man.

He had now, he felt sure, a clear comprehension of Lady Sophia. Their short interview at Burlington House had been illuminating. She was a typical example of the Adam's-rib woman; that is, of the woman who, intensely, almost exaggeratedly feminine, can live in any fullness only through another, and that other a man. Through Mr. Harding Lady Sophia had hitherto lived, and had doubtless, in her view, triumphed. Obviously a woman not free from a nervous vanity, and a woman of hungry ambition, her vanity and ambition had been fed by his growing notoriety, his increasing success and influence. The rib had thrilled with the body to which it belonged.

But that time of happy emotion, of admiration, of keen looking forward, was the property of the past. Lawn sleeves, purple, perhaps,—for who is more hopeful than this type of woman in the golden moments of life?—perhaps even an archiepiscopal throne faded from before the eyes they had gladdened—the eyes of faith in a man.

And a different woman was beginning to appear—a woman who might be as critical as she had formerly been admiring, a woman capable of becoming embittered.

On the Sunday of Malling's visit to Onslow Gardens, Mr. Harding's failure in the pulpit had waked up in his wife eager sympathy and eager spite, the one directed toward the man who had failed, the other toward the man who, as Malling felt sure, had caused the failure.

In Burlington House that woman, whom men with every reason adore, had given place to another less favorable toward him who had been her hero.

It seemed to Malling as if in the future a strange thing might happen, almost as if it must happen: it seemed to him as if Chichester might convey his view of his rector to his rector's wife.

"Study the link," Stepton had said. "There will be development in the link."

Already the words had proved true. There had been a development in Lady
Sophia such as Malling had certainly not anticipated. Where would it end?
Again and again, as he listened to the morning and evening sermons,
Malling had asked himself that question; again and again he had recalled
his conversation at Burlington House with Lady Sophia.

In the morning at St. Joseph's Mr. Harding had preached to a church that was half filled; in the evening Henry Chichester had preached to a church that was full to the doors. And each of the clergymen in turn had listened to the other, but how differently!

Mr. Harding had ascended to the pulpit with failure staring him in the face, and whereas on the Sunday when Malling first heard him he had obviously fought against the malign influence which eventually had prevailed over him, this time he had not had the vigor to make a struggle. Certainly he had not broken down. It might be said of him, as it was once said of a nation, that he had "muddled through." He had preached a very poor sermon in a very poor way, nervously, indeed, almost timidly, and with the manner of a man who was cowed and hopeless. The powerful optimism for which he had once been distinguished had given way to an almost unhealthy pessimism, alien surely to the minds of all believers, of all who profess to look forward to that life of which, as Tolstoi long ago said, our present life is but a dream. Even when he was uttering truths he spoke them as if he had an uneasy suspicion that they were lies. At moments he seemed to be almost pleading with his hearers to tolerate him, to "bear with him." Indeed, several times during his disjointed remarks he made use of the latter expression, promising that his discourse should be a short one. Very carefully he included himself among those aware of sin, very humbly he declared the unworthiness of any man to set himself up as a teacher and leader of others.

Now, humility is all very well, but if carried to excess, it suggests something less than a man. Mr. Harding almost cringed before his congregation. Malling did not feel that his humility was a pretense. On the contrary, it struck him as abominably real, but so excessive as to be not natural in any thorough man in a normal condition of mind and of body. It was the sort of humility that creates in the unregenerate a desire to offer a good kicking as a corrective.

Very different was the effect created by Chichester's sermon in the evening. Malling, aware though he had become of the great strengthening of Chichester, was amazed when he heard him preach.

Often it is said of a very fine preacher that he preached as one inspired. Chichester preached as one who knew. Never before had Malling been so impressed with the feeling that he was listening to truth, absolute truth, as he was while he listened to Chichester. There was something, though, that was almost deadly about it. It pierced like a lancet. It seared like a red-hot iron. It humbled almost too much. Here was no exaggerated humility, no pleading to be borne with, no cringing, and no doubt. A man who knew was standing up, and, with a sort of indifference to outside opinion that was almost frightening, was saying some of the things he knew about men, women—and surely God!

The subject was somewhat akin to that of the first sermon of Mr. Harding which Malling had heard. The rector then had preached on self-knowledge. The curate, now, preached on hypocrisy. Incidentally he destroyed his rector's sermon, flung it away on the scrap-heap, and passed on. This was not done viciously, but it was done relentlessly. Indeed, that was the note of the whole sermon. It was relentless, as truth is relentless, as death is relentless. And besides being terribly true, it was imaginative. But the preacher almost succeeded in conveying the impression to his congregation that what is generally called imagination is really vision, that the true imagination is seeing what is, but is often hidden, knowing what is, but is often unknown. The latter part of the sermon struck Malling as very unusual, even as very daring.

The preacher had spoken of the many varieties of hypocrisy. Finally he drew a picture of a finished hypocrite. And the man lived as a man lives in the pages of a great writer. One could walk round him, one knew him. And then Chichester treated him as the writer treats his creation; he proceeded to show his hypocrite in action.

The man, happy, almost triumphant,—for he now often looked upon himself with the eyes of others who knew him not,—was walking to his home on a winter's evening along a country road, passing now and then rustics who respectfully saluted him, neighbors who grasped his hand, children who innocently smiled at him, women who whispered that he was a fine fellow, the clergyman of his parish, who gave him God-speed upon his way as to one who deserved that God should speed him because his way was right. Snow was upon the ground. Such light as there was began to fade. It was evident that the night, which was very still, was going to be very dark. And the man stepped out briskly. Presently, at a lonely part of the road, happening to look down, he saw footprints in the freshly fallen snow. They were of feet that had recently passed on the way he was following. They had attracted, they continued to attract, his attention, he knew not why. And as he went on, his eyes were often upon them.

Presently he began to wonder about the feet which had made the prints he saw. Did they belong to a man or a woman? The prints were too large to have been made by the feet of a child. He gazed at them searchingly, and made up his mind that it was a man who had recently trodden this road. And what sort of man was it that thus preceded him not very far away? He became deeply engrossed with this question. His mind revolved about this unknown traveler, floating forward in surmises, till, by chance, he happened to set his right foot in one of the prints left in the snow. His foot exactly filled it. This fact, he knew not why, startled him. He stopped, bent down, examined the snow closely, measured very carefully his feet with the prints before him, now rather faintly discerned in the gathering darkness. The prints might have been made by his own feet. Having ascertained this, and reflected for a moment, he went forward, now assailed by a growing curiosity as to the personality and character of the stranger. But perhaps he was not a stranger. He might surely well be a neighbor, an acquaintance, perhaps even a friend. The man meant, if possible, to come up with him, whoever he was, and he now hurried along with the intention of joining the unknown whose footprints were the same as his own.

At this point in his sermon Chichester paused for a moment. And Malling, who seldom felt any thrill at a séance, and who had often remained calmly watchful and alert during manifestations which amazed or terrified others, was aware of a feeling of cold, which seemed to pass like a breath through his spirit. The congregation about him, perhaps struck by the unusual form of the sermon, remained silent and motionless, waiting. In his stall sat the rector with downcast eyes. Malling could not at that moment discern his expression. His large figure and important powerful head and face showed almost like those of a carven effigy in the lowered light of the chancel. The choirboys did not stir, and the small, fair man in the pulpit, raising his thin hands, and resting them on the marble ledge, continued quietly, taking up his sermon with a repetition of the last words uttered, "whose footprints were the same as his own."

Again the cold breath went through Malling's spirit. He leaned slightly forward and gazed at Chichester.

For some time the man thus went onward, following the footprints in the snow, but not overtaking any one, and becoming momentarily more eager to satisfy his curiosity. Then, on a sudden, he started, stopped, and listened. It had now become very dark, and in this darkness, and the great stillness of night, he heard the faint sound of a footfall before him, brushing through the crisp snow, which lay lightly, and not very deep, on the hard highroad leading to the village on the farther outskirts of which his house was situated. He could not yet see any one, but he felt sure that the person who made this faint sound was no other than he in whose steps he had been treading. It would now be a matter of only a minute or two to come up with him. And the man went on, but more slowly, whether because he was now certain of attaining his object or for some other reason.

The sound of the footfall persisted, and was certainly not far off. The prints in the snow were so fresh that they seemed not quite motionless, as if the snow were only now settling after the pressure it had just suffered. The man slackened his pace. He did not like the sound which he heard. He began to feel as if he by whom it was made would not prove a companion to his taste. Yet his curiosity continued. There began within him a struggle between his curiosity and another sensation, which was of repugnance, almost of fear. And so equal were the combatants that the lights of the village were in sight, and he had not decreased the distance between himself and the other. Seeing the lights, however, his curiosity got the upper hand. He slightly quickened his pace, and almost immediately beheld the shape of a man relieved against the night, and treading onward through the snow. And as the sound of the footsteps had been disagreeable to his nerves, so the contours of the moving blackness repelled him. He did not like the look of this man whose footprints were the same as his own, and he decided not to join him. But, moving rather cautiously, he gained a little upon him, in order to make sure, if possible, whether or not he was a neighbor or an acquaintance.

The figure seemed somehow familiar to our man, indeed, oddly familiar. Nevertheless, he was unable to identify it. As he followed it, more and more certain did he become that he had seen it, that he knew it. And yet—did he know it? Had he seen it? It was almost as if one part of him denied while the other affirmed. He longed, yet feared, to see the face. But the face never looked back. And so, one at a little distance behind the other, they came into the village.

Here a strange thing occurred.

There were very few people about, but there were a few, and two or three of them, meeting the person our man was following, greeted him respectfully. But these same people, when immediately afterward they encountered the other, who had known them for years, and whom they of course knew, showed the greatest perturbation; one, a woman, even signs of terror. They gave him no greeting, shrank from him as he passed, and stared after him, as if bemused, when he was gone by. Their behavior was almost incredible. But he was so set on what was before him that he stopped to ask no questions.

The village was a long one. Always one behind the other, walking at an even pace, the two men traversed it, approaching at last the outskirts, where, separated from the other habitations, and surrounded by a garden in which the trees were laden with snow, stood the house of the man who now watched and followed, with a growing wonder and curiosity, combined with an ever-growing repugnance, him who made the footprints, who had been saluted by the villagers, whose figure and general aspect seemed in somewise familiar to him, and yet whom he could not recognize. Where could this person be going? The man asked himself, and came to a resolve not to follow on into the darkness of the open country, not to proceed beyond his own home, of which now he saw the lights, but to make an effort to see the face of the other before the garden gate was reached.

In this attempt, however, he was destined to be frustrated. For as he determinedly quickened his steps, so did the other, who gained the gate of the garden, unlatched it, turned in, and walked on among the trees going toward the principal door.

A visitor, then! The man paused by his garden gate, whence he could see his house front, with the light from the window of his own sitting-room streaming over the porch. The stranger stood before it, made a movement as if searching in his pocket, drew out his hand, lifted it. The door opened at once. He disappeared within, and the door closed after him.

He had opened the door with a key.

The man at the gate felt overcome by a sensation almost of horror, which he could not explain to himself. It was not that he was horrified by the certainly extraordinary fact of some one possessing a key to his house, and using it in this familiar fashion. It was not even that he was horrified at seeing a man, perhaps a stranger, disappearing thus into his home by night, uninvited, unexpected. What horrified him was that this particular man, whose footprints he had followed and measured with his foot, whose footfalls he had heard, whose form he had seen outlined against the night, should be within his house, where his wife and his children were, and where his venerable mother was sitting beside the fire. That this man should be there! He knew now that from the first moment when he had been aware of his existence he had hated him, that his subconscious mind had hated him.

But who was he? The natural thing would have been to follow quickly into the house, to see who had entered, to demand an explanation. But he could not do this. Why? He himself did not know why. But he knew that he dared not do this. And he waited, expecting he knew not what; a cry, a summons, perhaps, some manifestation that would force him to approach.

None came. Steadily the lights shone from the house. There was no sound but the soft fall of a block of snow from an overladen fir branch in the garden. The man began to marvel. Who could this be whose familiar entry into his—his home thus at night caused no disturbance? There were dogs within: they had not barked. There were servants: apparently they had not stirred. It was almost as if this stranger's permanence was accepted by the household. A long, long time had slipped by.

The man at length, making an almost fierce effort, partly dominated the unreasoning sense of horror which possessed him. He opened the gate, stepped into the garden, and made his way slowly and softly toward the house door. But suddenly he stopped. Through the unshuttered window of his sitting-room, the room in which for years he had spent much of his time, in which he had concocted many schemes to throw dust in the eyes of his neighbors, and even of his own relatives, in which he had learned very perfectly to seem what he was not, and to hide what he really was, he perceived the figure of a man. It crossed the lighted space slowly, and disappeared with a downward movement. He knew it was the man he had been following and whom he had seen enter his house.

For a long while he remained where he was on the path of the garden. The night deepened about him. A long way off, at the other end of the village, a clock chimed the hours. In the cottages the lights were extinguished. The few loungers disappeared from the one long street vanishing over the snow. And the man never moved. A numb terror possessed him. Yet, despite his many faults and his life of evil, he had never been physically a coward. Always the light shone steadily from the window of his study, making a patch of yellow upon the snow. Always the occupant of the room must be seated tranquilly there, like an owner. For no figure had risen, had repassed across the unshuttered space.

The man told himself again and again that he must go forward till he gained the window, that he must at least look into the room; if he dared not enter the house to confront the intruder, to demand an explanation. But again and again something within him, which seemed to be a voice from the innermost chamber of his soul, whispered to him not to go, whispered to him to leave the intruder alone, to let the intruder do what he would, but not to approach him, above all, not to look upon his face. And the man obeyed the voice till a thing happened which roused in him a powerful beast, called by many the natural man.

He saw his wife, whom he loved in his way, though he had tricked and deceived her again and again, cross the window space, smiling, and disappear with a downward movement, as the other had disappeared. Then she rose into his range of vision, and stood for a moment so that he could see her clearly, smiling, talking, making little gestures that he knew, carrying her hand to her face, stretching it out, dropping it. Finally she lifted it to her lips, half-closing her eyes at the same time, took it away quickly, with a sort of butterfly motion, and vanished, going toward the left, where the room door was.

So had she many and many a time bidden him, her husband, good night. Instantly, with an impulse which seemed combined of rage and terror, both now full of a driving force which was irresistible, the man sprang forward to the window, seized the stone coping with his hands and stared into his room.

Seated in a round chair at his writing-table, by a lamp with a green shade, was the man who had entered his house. He was writing busily in a book with a silver clasp that could be locked with a key, and he leaned a little over the table with his head turned away. The shape of his head, his posture, even the manner in which he used his pen as he traced line after line in the book, made an abominable impression upon the man staring in at the window. But the face—the face! He must see that! And he leaned forward, trembling, but fiercely, and, pressing his own face against the pane, he looked at the occupant of his room as men look sometimes with their souls.

The man at the table lifted his head. He laid down the pen, blotted the book in which he had been writing, shut it up, clasped it, locked it with a tiny key, and put it carefully into a drawer of the table, which also he locked. He got up, stood for an instant by the table with one hand upon it, then turned slowly toward the window, smiling, as men smile to themselves when they are thinking of their own ingenuities.

The man outside the window fell back into the snow as if God's hand had touched him. He had seen his own face! So he smiled sometimes at the end of a day, when he had finished writing down in his diary some of the hidden things of his life.

He turned, and as the window through which he had been looking suddenly darkened, he fled away into the night.

When the lights, which at St. Joseph's were always kept lowered during the sermon, once more strongly illuminated the chancel, Mr. Harding turned a ghastly face toward the pulpit. In the morning Chichester had listened to him, as a man of truth might listen to a man who is trying to lie, but who cannot deceive him. In the evening Mr. Harding had listened to Chichester—how? What had been the emotions only shadowed faintly forth in that ghastly face?

When Malling got home, he asked himself why Chichester had made such an impression upon his mind. His story of the double, strange enough, no doubt, in a sermon, could not surely have come upon Malling with any of the force and the interest of the new. For years he had been familiar with tales of ghosts, of voices, of appearances at the hour of death, of doubles. Of course in the sermon there had been a special application of the story. It had been very short. Chichester had suggested that if, as by a miracle, the average self-contented man could look at himself with the eyes of his soul full of subliminal self-knowledge and with the bodily eyes, he would be stricken down by a great horror.

And he had spoken as a man who knew. Indeed, it seemed to Malling that he had spoken as might have delivered himself the man who had followed his double through the snow, who had looked in upon him by night from the garden, if he had faced, instead of flying from, the truth; if he had stayed, if he had persistently watched his double leading the life he had led, if he had learned a great lesson that perhaps only his double could teach him.

But if the man had stayed, what would have been the effect on the double?
Malling sat till deep in the night pondering these things.

VII

Lady Sophia had said to Malling that if he went to the two services at St. Joseph's on the Sunday she would invite him to see her again. She was as good as her word. In the middle of the week he received a note from her, saying she would be at home at four on Thursday, if he was able to come. He went, and found her alone. But as soon as he entered the drawing-room and had taken her hand, she said:

"I am expecting Mr. Chichester almost immediately. He's coming to tea."

"I shall be glad to meet him," said Malling, concealing his surprise, which was great.

Yet he did not know why it should be. For what more natural than that
Chichester should be coming?

"I heard of you at St. Joseph's," Lady Sophia continued. "A friend of mine, Lily Armitage, saw you there. I didn't. I was sitting at the back. I have taken to sitting quite at the back of the church. What did you think of it?"

"Do you wish me to be frank, and do you mean the two sermons?"

She hesitated for an instant. Then she said:

"I do mean the sermons, and I do wish you to be frank."

"I thought Mr. Chichester's sermon very remarkable indeed."

"And my husband's sermon?"

Her lips twisted almost as if with contempt when she said the words, "my husband's."

"Why doesn't Mr. Harding take a long rest?" said Malling, speaking conventionally, a thing that he seldom did.

"You think he needs one?"

"He has a tiresome malady, I understand."

"What malady?"

"Doesn't he suffer very much from nervous dyspepsia?"

She looked at him with irony, which changed almost instantly into serious reflection. But the irony returned.

"Now and then he has a touch of it," she said. "Very few of us don't have something. But we have to go on, and we do go on, nevertheless."

"I think a wise doctor would probably order your husband away," said Malling, though Mr. Harding's departure was the last thing he desired just then.

"Even if he were ordered away, I don't know that he would go."

"Why not?"

"I don't think he would. I don't feel as if he could get away," she said, with what seemed to Malling a sort of odd obstinacy. "In fact, I know he's not going," she abruptly added. "I have an instinct."

Malling felt sure that she had considered, perhaps long before he had suggested it, this very project of Mr. Harding's departure for a while for rest, and that she had rejected it. Her words recalled to his mind some other words of her husband, spoken in Mr. Harding's study: "Surely one ought to get out of such an atmosphere, to get out of it, and to keep out of it. But how extraordinary it is the difficulty men have in getting away from things!"

Perhaps Lady Sophia was right. Perhaps the rector could not get away from the atmosphere which seemed to be destroying him.

"I dare say he is afraid to trust everything to his curates," observed
Malling, prosaically.

"He needn't be—now," she replied.

In that "now," as she said it, there lay surely a whole history. Malling understood that Lady Sophia, suddenly perhaps, had given her husband up. Since Malling had first encountered her she had cried, "Le roi est mort!" in her heart. The way she had just uttered the word "now" made Malling wonder whether she was not about to utter the supplementary cry, "Vive le roi!"

As he looked at her, with this wonder in his mind, Henry Chichester came into the room.

There was an expression of profound sadness on his face, which seemed to dignify it, to make it more powerful, more manly, than it had been. The choir-boy look was gone. Malling of course knew how very much expression can change a human being; nevertheless, he was startled by the alteration in the curate's outward man. It seemed, to use the rector's phrase, that he had "shed his character." And now, perhaps, the new character, mysteriously using matter as the vehicle of its manifestation, was beginning to appear to the eyes of men. He showed no surprise at the sight of Malling, but rather a faint, though definite, pleasure. The way in which Lady Sophia greeted him was a revelation to Malling, and a curious exhibition of feminine psychology.

She looked up at him from the low chair in which she was sitting, gave him her left hand, and said, "Are you very tired?" That was all. Yet it would have been impossible to express more clearly a woman's mental, not affectional, subjugation by a man, her instinctive yielding to power, her respect for authority, her recognition that the master of her master had come into the room.

Her "Vive le roi!" was said.

Chichester accepted Lady Sophia's subtle homage with an air of unconsciousness. His interior melancholy seemed to lift him above the small things that flatter small men. He acknowledged that he was tired, and would be glad of tea. He had been down in the East End. The rector had asked him to talk over something with Mr. Carlile of the Church Army.

"You mean that you suggested to the rector that it would be wise to see
Mr. Carlile," said Lady Sophia.

"Is the rector coming in to tea?" asked Chichester.

"Possibly he may," she replied. "He knew Mr. Malling was to be here. Did you tell him you were coming?"

"No. I was not certain I should get away in time."

"I think he will probably turn up."

A footman brought in tea at this moment, and Malling told the curate he had heard him preach in the evening of last Sunday.

"It was a deeply interesting sermon," he said.

"Thank you," said Chichester, very impersonally.

The footman went away, and Lady Sophia began to make tea.

"When I went home," Malling continued, "I sat up till late thinking it over. Part of it suggested to my mind one or two rather curious speculations."

"Which part?" asked Lady Sophia, dipping a spoon into a silver tea-caddy.

"The part about the man and his double."

She shivered, and some of the tea with which she had just filled the spoon was shaken out of it.

"That was terrible," she said.

"What were your speculations?" said Chichester, showing a sudden and definite waking up of keen interest.

"One of them was this—"

Before he could continue, the door opened again, and the tall and powerful form of the rector appeared. And as the outer man of Chichester seemed to Malling to have begun subtly to change, in obedience surely to the change of his inner man, so seemed Mr. Harding a little altered physically, as he now slowly came forward to greet his wife's two visitors. The power of his physique seemed to be struck at by something within, and to be slightly marred. One saw that largeness can become but a wide surface for the tragic exhibition of weakness. As the rector perceived the presence of Chichester, an expression of startled pain fled over his face and was gone in an instant. He greeted the two men and sat down.

"Have you just begun tea?" he asked, looking now at his wife.

"We are just going to begin it," she replied. "We are talking about the sermon of last Sunday."

"Oh," rejoined the rector.

He turned to Malling.

"Did you come to hear me preach again?"

There was a note as of slight reassurance in his voice.

"Mr. Chichester's sermon," said Lady Sophia.

"Oh, I see," said the rector. He glanced hastily from one to the other of the three people in the room, like a man searching for sympathy or help. "What were you saying about our friend Chichester's sermon?" he asked, with a forced air of interest.

Lady Sophia distributed cups for tea.

"I was speaking of that part of it which dealt with the man who followed his double," said Malling.

"Ah?" said the rector.

He was holding his tea-cup. His hand trembled slightly at this moment, and the china rattled. He set the cup down on the small table before him.

"You said," observed Chichester—toward whom Lady Sophia immediately turned, with an almost rapt air—"that it suggested some curious speculations to your mind. I should very much like to know what they were."

"One was this. Suppose the man in the garden, who looked in upon his double, had not fled away. Suppose he had had the courage to remain, and, in hiding—for the sake of argument we may assume the situation to be possible—"

"Ah, indeed! And why not?" interrupted Chichester.

His voice, profoundly melancholy, fell like a weight upon those who heard him. And again Malling thought of him almost as some one set apart from his fellows by some mysterious knowledge, some heavy burthen of truth.

"—and in hiding had watched the life of his double. I sat up speculating what effect such an observation, terrible no doubt and grotesque, would be likely to have on the soul of the watching man. But there was another speculation with which I entertained my mind that night."

"Let us have it," said Chichester, leaning forward, and, with the gesture characteristic of him, dropping his hands down between his knees. "Let us have it."

"Suppose the man to remain and, in hiding, to watch the life of his double, what effect would such an observation be likely to have upon the double?"

Malling paused. The rector, with an almost violent movement of his big hand and arm, took his cup from the table and drank his tea.

"It didn't occur to you, I suppose, when composing your sermon to follow that train of thought?" said Malling to Chichester.

"No," replied the curate, slowly, and like one thinking profoundly. "I was too engrossed with the feelings of the man. But, then, you thought of the double as a living man, with all the sensations of a man?"

"That was your fault," said Malling.

"His fault!" said Lady Sophia, with a sort of latent sharpness, and laying an emphasis on the second word.

"Certainly; for making the narrative so vital and human."

He addressed himself again to the curate.

"Did you not give to the double the attributes of a man? Did you not make his wife come to bid him good night, bend down to kiss him, waft him a characteristic farewell?"

"It is true. I did," said Chichester, still speaking like a man in deep thought.

"That was the most terrible part of all," said Lady Sophia. In her voice there was an accent almost of horror. "It sickened me to the soul," she continued—"the idea of a woman bidding a tender good night to an apparition."

"I took it as a man," said Malling.

They had all three, strangely, left the rector out of this discussion, and he seemed willing that it should be so. He now sat back in his chair listening to all that was being said, somewhat as he had listened to the sermon of Chichester, in a sort of ghastly silence.

"How could a man's double be a man?" said Lady Sophia.

"We are in the region of assumption and of speculation," returned Malling, quietly, "a not uninteresting region either, I think. The other night for a whole hour, having assumed the double man, I speculated on his existence, spied upon by his other self. And you never did that?"

He looked at Chichester.

"When I was making my sermon I was engrossed by the thought of the watching man."

Malling's idea had evidently laid a grip upon Chichester's mind.

"Tell me what the double's existence would be, according to you," he said. "Tell me."

"You imagined the lesson learnt by the man so terrible that he fled away into the night."

"Yes."

"Had he been strong enough to stay—"

"Strong enough!" interposed Chichester. "Better say, had he been obliged to stay."

"Very well. Given that compulsion, in my imagination the double must have learnt a lesson, too. If we can learn by contemplation, can we not, must we not, learn by being contemplated? Life is permeated by reciprocity. I can imagine another sermon growing out of yours of last Sunday."

"Yes, you are right—you are right," said Chichester.

"The double, then, in my imagination, would gradually become uneasy under this secret observation. You described him as, his wife gone, sitting down comfortably to write some account of the hidden doings of his life, as, the writing finished, the diary committed to the drawer and safely locked away, rising up to go to rest with a smile of self-satisfaction. It seemed to me that, given my circumstance of the persistent observation, a few nights later matters would have been very different within that room. The hypocrite is happy, if he is happy at all, when he is convinced that his hypocrisy is successful. Take away that certainty, and he would be invaded by anxiety. Set any one to watch him closely, he would certainly suffer, if he knew it."

"If he knew it! That is the point," said Chichester. "You put the man watching the double in hiding."

"There are influences not yet fully understood which can traverse space, which can touch not as a hand touches, but as unmistakably. I imagined the soul of the double touched in this way, the waters troubled."

"Troubled! Troubled!"

It was Mr. Harding who had spoken, almost lamentably. His powerfully shaped head now drooped forward on his breast.

"I imagined," continued Malling, "a sort of gradual disintegration beginning, and proceeding, in the double—a disintegration of the soul, if such a thing can be conceived of."

His piercing eyes went from Chichester to Harding.

"Or, no," he corrected himself. "Perhaps that is an incorrect description of my—very imaginative—flight through speculation the other night. Possibly I should say a gradual transference, instead of disintegration of soul. For it seemed to me as if the man who watched might gradually, as it were, absorb into himself the soul of the double, but purified. For the watcher has the tremendous advantage of seeing the hypocrite living the hypocrite's life, while the hypocrite is only seen. Might not the former, therefore, conceivably draw in strength, while the other faded into weakness? Ignorance is the terrible thing in life, I think. Now the man who watched would receive knowledge, fearful knowledge, but the man who was watched, while perhaps suffering first uneasiness, then possibly even terror, would not, in my conception, ever clearly understand. He would not any longer dare at night to sit down alone to fill up that dreadful diary. He would not any longer perhaps—I only say perhaps—dare to commit the deeds the record of which in the past the diary held. But his lesson would be one of fear, making for weakness, finally almost for nothingness. And the other night I conceived of him at last fading away in the gloom of his room with the darkened window."

"That was your end!" said Mr. Harding, in a low voice.

"Yes, that was my end."

"Then," said Chichester, "you think the lesson men learn from being contemplated tends only to destroy them?"

But Malling, now with a smiling change to greater lightness and ease, hastened to traverse this statement.

"No, no," he replied. "For the contemplation of a man by his fellow-men must always be an utterly different thing from his own contemplation by himself. For our fellow-men always remain in a very delightful ignorance of us. Don't they, Lady Sophia? And so they can never destroy us, luckily for us."

He had done what he wished to do, and he was now ready for other activities. But he found it was not easy to switch his companions off onto another trail. Lady Sophia, now that he looked at her closely, he saw to be under the influence of fear, provoked doubtless by the subject they had been discussing. Chichester, also, had a look as of fear in his eyes. As to the rector, he sat gazing at his curate, and there had come upon his countenance an expression of almost unnatural resolution, such as a coward's might wear if terror forced him into defiance.

In reply to Malling's half-laughing question, Lady Sophia said:

"You've studied all these things, haven't you?"

"Do you mean what are sometimes called occult questions?"

"Yes."

"I have."

"And do you believe in them?"

"I'm afraid I must ask you to be a little more definite."

"Do you believe that there are such things as doubles?"

"I have no reason to believe that there are, unless you include wrongly in the term the merely physical replica. It appears to be established that now and then two human beings are born who, throughout their respective lives remain physically so much alike that it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between them."

"I didn't mean only that," she said quickly.

"You meant the double in mind and soul as well as in body," said
Chichester.

"Yes."

"How can one see if a soul is the double of another soul?" said Malling.

"Then you think such a story as Mr. Chichester related in his sermon all nonsense?" said Lady Sophia, almost hotly, and yet, it seemed to Malling, with a slight lifting of the countenance, as if relief perhaps were stealing through her.

"I thought it a legitimate and powerful invention introduced to point a moral."

"Nothing more than that?" said Lady Sophia.

Malling did not reply; for suddenly a strange question had risen up in him. Did he really think it nothing more than that? He glanced at Chichester, and the curate's eyes seemed asking him to say.

The rector's heavy and powerful frame shifted in his chair, and his voice was heard saying:

"My dear Sophy, I think you had better leave such things alone. You do not know where they might lead you."

There was in his voice a sound of forced authority, as if he had been obliged to "screw himself up" to speak as he had just spoken. Lady Sophia was about to make a quick rejoinder when, still with a forced air of resolution, Mr. Harding addressed himself to Chichester.

"Since I saw you this morning," he said, "I find that I shall not be here next Sunday."

He looked about the circle at his wife and Malling.

"The doctor has ordered me away for a week, and I've decided to go."

His introduction of the subject had been abrupt. As if almost in despite of themselves, Lady Sophia and Malling exchanged glances. Chichester said nothing.

"You can get on without me quite well, of course," continued the rector.

"Are you going to be away long?" said Chichester.

"No; I think only for a week or so. The doctor says I absolutely need a breath of fresh air."

Malling got up to go.

"I hope you'll enjoy your little holiday," he said. "Are you going far?"

"Oh, dear, no. My doctor recommends Tankerton on the Kentish coast. It seems the air there is extraordinary. When the tide is down it comes off the mud flats. A kind parishioner of mine—" he turned slightly toward his wife: "Mrs. Amherst, Sophy—has a cottage there and has often offered me the use of it. I hope to accept her offer now."

Lady Sophia expressed no surprise at the project, and did not inquire whether her husband wished her to accompany him.

But when she shook hands with Malling, her dark eyes seemed to say to him, "I was wrong."

And he thought she looked humbled.

VIII

"Could you come down stay with me Saturday till Monday all alone air delicious feel rather solitary glad of your company Marcus Harding Minors Tankerton Kent."

Such was the telegram which Evelyn Malling was considering on the following Friday afternoon. The sender had paid an answer. The telegraph-boy was waiting in the hall. Malling only kept him five minutes. He went away with this reply:

"Accept with pleasure will take four twenty train at Victoria Saturday Malling."

Malling could not have said with truth that he had expected a summons from Mr. Harding, yet he found that he was not surprised to get it. The man was in a bad way. He needed sympathy, he needed help. That was certain. But whether he could help him was more than doubtful, Malling thought. Perhaps, really, a doctor and the wonderful air from the mud flats of Tankerton! But here Malling found that a strong incredulity checked him. He did not believe that the rector would be restored by a doctor's advice and a visit to the sea.

That afternoon he went to Westminster, and asked for Professor Stepton.

"He is away, sir," said the fair Scotch parlormaid.

"For long?"

"We don't know, sir. He has gone into Kent, on research business, I believe."

Agnes had been for a long time in the professor's service, and was greatly trusted. The professor had come upon her originally when making investigations into "second sight," a faculty which she claimed to possess. By the way she was also an efficient parlor-maid.

"Kent!" said Malling. "Do you know where he is staying?"

"The address he left is the Tankerton Hotel, Tankerton, near
Whitstable-on-Sea, sir."

"Thank you, Agnes," said Malling.

"It is a haunted house somewhere Birchington way the professor is after,
I believe, sir."

"Luck favors me!" said Malling to himself, unscientifically, as he walked away from the house.

On the following day it was in a singularly expectant and almost joyously alert frame of mind that he bought a first-class ticket for Whitstable-on-Sea, which is the station for Tankerton.

He would involve Stepton in this affair. There was a mystery in it. Malling was now convinced of that. And his original supposition did not satisfy him. But perhaps Mr. Harding meant to help him. Perhaps Mr. Harding intended to be explicit. The difficulty there was that he also was walking in darkness, as Malling believed. His telegram had come like a cry out of this darkness.

"Faversham! Faversham!" the fair Kentish porters were calling. Only about twenty minutes now! Would the rector be at the station?

He was. As the train ran in alongside the wooden platform, Mailing caught sight of the towering authoritative figure. Was it his fancy which made him think that it looked slightly bowed, even perhaps a little shrunken?

"Good of you to come!" said the rector in a would-be hearty voice, but also with a genuine accent of pleasure. "All the afternoon I have been afraid of a telegram."

"Why?" asked Malling, as they shook hands.

"Oh, when one is anxious for a thing, one does not always get it. Ha, ha!"

He broke into a covering laugh.

"Here is a porter. You've only got this bag. Capital! I have a fly waiting. We go down these steps."

As they descended, Malling remarked:

"By the way, we have a friend staying here. Have you come across him?"

"No, I have seen nobody—that is, no acquaintance. Who is it?"

"Stepton."

"The professor down here!" exclaimed Mr. Harding, as if startled.

"At the hotel, I believe. He's come down to make some investigation."

"I haven't seen him."

They stepped into the fly, and drove through the long street of Whitstable toward the outlying houses of Tankerton, scattered over grassy downs above a quiet, brown sea.

"The air is splendid, certainly," observed Malling, drinking it in almost like a gourmet savoring a wonderful wine.

"It must do me good. Don't you think so?"

The question sounded anxious to Malling's ears.

"It ought to do every one good, I should think."

"Here is Minors."

The fly stopped before a delightfully gay little red doll's house—so Malling thought of it—standing in a garden surrounded by a wooden fence, with the downs undulating about it. Not far off, but behind it, was the sea. And the rector, pointing to a red building in the distance, on the left and much nearer to the beach, said:

"That is the hotel where the professor must be staying, if he is here."

"I'll go over presently and ask about him."

"Oh," said Mr. Harding. "Bring in the bag, please, Jennings. The room on the right, at the top of the stairs."

Malling had believed in London that Mr. Harding's telegram to him was a cry out of darkness. That first evening in the cheerful doll's house he knew his belief was well founded. When they sat at dinner, like two monsters, Malling thought, who had somehow managed to insert themselves into a doll's dining-room, it was obvious that the rector was ill at ease. Again and again he seemed to be on the verge of some remark, perhaps of some outburst of speech, and to check himself only when the words were almost visibly trembling on his lips. In his eyes Malling saw plainly his longing for utterance, his hesitation; reserve and a desire to liberate his soul, the one fighting against the other. And at moments the whole man seemed to be wrapped in weakness like a garment, the soul and the body of him. Then, as a light may dwindle till it seems certain to go out, all that was Marcus Harding seemed to Malling to dwindle. The large body, the powerful head and face, meant little, almost nothing, because the spirit was surely fading. But these moments passed. Then it was as if the light flared suddenly up again.

When dinner was over, Mr. Harding asked Malling if he would like to take a stroll.

"The sea air will help us to sleep," he said.

"I should like nothing better," said Malling. "Haven't you been sleeping well lately?"

"Very badly. We had better take our coats."

They put the coats on, and went out, making their way to the broad, grassy walk raised above the shingle of the beach. The tide was far down, and the oozing flats were uncovered. So still, so waveless was the brown water that at this hour it was impossible to perceive where it met the brown land. In the distance, on the right, shone the lights of Herne Bay, with its pier stretching far out into the shallows. Away to the left was the lonely island of Sheppey, a dull shadow beyond the harbor, where the oyster-boats lay at rest. There were very few people about: some fisher-lads solemnly or jocosely escorting their girls, who giggled faintly as they passed Mr. Harding and Malling; two or three shopkeepers from Whitstable taking the air; a boatman or two vaguely hovering, with blue eyes turned from habit to the offing.

The two men paced slowly up and down. And again Malling was aware of words trembling upon the rector's lips—words which he could not yet resolve frankly to utter. Whether it was the influence of the faintly sighing sea, of the almost sharply pure air, of the distant lights gleaming patiently, or whether an influence came out from the man beside him and moved him, Malling did not know; but he resolved to do a thing quite contrary to his usual practice. He resolved to try to force a thing on, instead of waiting till it came to him naturally. He became impatient, he who was generally a patient seeker.

"You remember our former conversations with regard to Henry Chichester?" he said abruptly, changing the subject of their discourse.

"Chichester? Yes—yes. What of him?"

"I wish to tell you that I think you are right, that I think there is an extraordinary, even an amazing, change in Chichester."

"There is, indeed," said Mr. Harding. "And—and it will increase."

He spoke with a sort of despairing conviction.

"What makes you think so?"

"It must. It cannot be otherwise—unless—"

He paused.

"Yes," said Malling; "unless—"

"A thing almost impossible were to happen."

"May I, without indiscretion, ask what that is?"

"Unless he were to leave St. Joseph's, to go quite away."

"Surely that would not be impossible!"

"I often think it is. Chichester will not wish to go."

"Are you certain of that?" asked Malling, remembering the curate's remark in Horton Street, that perhaps he would not remain at St. Joseph's much longer.

The rector turned his head and fixed his eyes upon Malling.

"Has he said anything to you about leaving?" he asked, suddenly raising his voice, as if under the influence of excitement. "But of course he has not."

"Surely it is probable that such a man may be offered a living."

"He would not take it."

They walked on a few steps in silence, turned, and strolled back. It was now growing dark. Their faces were set toward the distant gleam of the Herne Bay lights.

"I am not so sure," at length dropped out Malling.

"Why are you not so sure?"

"Why do you think Chichester's departure from St. Joseph's impossible?"

Malling spoke strongly to determine, if possible, the rector to speak, to say out all that was in his heart.

"Can I tell you?" Mr. Harding almost murmured. "Can I tell you?"

"I think you asked me here that you might tell me something."

"It is true. I did."

"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.

"It was indeed my passion. I loved authority. I loved to be in command. I was full of ecclesiastical ambition. Feeling that I had intellectual strength, I intended to rise to the top of the church, to become a bishop eventually, perhaps even something greater. When I was presented to St. Joseph's,—my wife's social influence had something to do with that,—I saw all the gates opening before me. I made a great effect in London. I may say with truth that no clergyman was more successful than I was—at one time. My wife spurred me on. She was immensely ambitious for me. I must tell you that in marrying me she had gone against all her family. They thought me quite unworthy of her notice. But from the first time I met her I meant to marry her. And as I dominated others, I completely dominated her. But she, once married to me, was desperately anxious that I should rise in the world, in order that her choice of me might be justified in the eyes of her people. You can understand the position, I dare say?"

"Perfectly," said Malling.

"I may say that she irritated my ambition, that she stung it into almost a furious activity. Women have great influence with us. I thought she was my slave almost, but I see now that she also influenced me. She worshiped me for my immediate success at St. Joseph's. You may think it very ridiculous, considering that I am merely the rector of a fashionable London church, but there was a time when I felt almost intoxicated by my wife's worship of me, and by my domination over the crowds who came to hear me preach. Domination! That was my fetish! That was what led me to—oh, sometimes I think it must end in my ruin!"

"Perhaps not," said Malling, quietly. "Let us see."

His words, perhaps even more his manner, seemed greatly to help Mr.
Harding.

"I will tell you everything," he exclaimed. "From the first I have felt as if you were the man to assist me, if any man could. I had always, since I was an undergraduate at Oxford,—I was a Magdalen man,—been interested in psychical matters, and followed carefully all the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. I had also at that time,—in Oxford,—made some experiments with my college friends, chiefly in connection with will power. My influence seemed to be specially strong. But I need not go into all that. After leaving Oxford and taking orders, for a long time I gave such matters up. I feared, if I showed my strong interest in psychical research, especially if I was known to attend séances or anything of that kind, it might be considered unsuitable in a clergyman, and might injure my prospects. It was not until Henry Chichester came to St. Joseph's that I was tempted again into paths which I had chosen to consider forbidden to me. Chichester tempted me! Chichester tempted me!"

He spoke the last words with a sort of lamentable energy.

"Such a gentle, yielding man as he was!"

"It was just that. He came under my influence at once, and showed it in almost all he said and did. He looked up to me, he strove to model himself upon me, he almost worshiped me. One evening,—it was in the pulpit!—the idea shot through my brain, 'I could do what I like with that man, make of him just what I choose, use him just as I please.' And I turned my eyes toward the choir where Chichester sat in the last stall, hanging on my words. At that instant I can only suppose that what people sometimes call the maladie de grandeur—the mania for power—took hold upon me, and combined with my furtive longing after research in those mysterious regions where perhaps all we desire is hidden. Anyhow, at that instant I resolved to try to push my influence over Chichester to its utmost limit, and by illegitimate means."

"Illegitimate?"

"I call them so. Yes, yes, they are not legitimate. I know that now. And he—but I dare not think what he knows!"

The rector was greatly moved. He half rose from the bench on which they were sitting, then, making a strong effort, controlled himself, sank back, and continued:

"At that time, in the early days of his association with me, Chichester thought that everything I did, everything I suggested, even everything that came into my mind, must be good and right. He never dreamed of criticizing me. In his view, I was altogether above criticism. And if I approached him with any sort of intimacy he was in the greatest joy. You know, perhaps, Mr. Malling, how the worshiper receives any confidence from the one he worships. He looks upon it as the greatest compliment that can be paid him. I resolved to pay that compliment to Henry Chichester.

"You must know that although I had entirely given up the occult practices—that may not be the exact term, but you will understand what I mean—I had indulged in at Oxford, I had never relaxed my deep, perhaps my almost morbid interest in the efforts that were being made by scientists and others to break through the barrier dividing us on earth from the spirit world. Although I had chosen the career of a clergyman,—alas! I looked upon the church, I suppose, as little more than a career!—I was not a very faithful man. I had many doubts which, as clergymen must, I concealed. By nature I suppose I had rather an incredulous mind. Not that I was a skeptic, but I was sometimes a doubter. Rather than faith, I should have much preferred to have knowledge, exact knowledge. Often I even felt ironical when confronted with the simple faith we clergymen should surely encourage, sustain, and humbly glory in, whereas with skepticism, even when openly expressed, I always felt some part of myself to be in secret sympathy. I continued to study works, both English and foreign, on psychical research. I followed the experiments of Lodge, William James, and others. Myers's great work on human personality was forever at my elbow. And the longer I was debarred—self-debarred because of my keen ambition and my determination to do nothing that could ever make me in any way suspect in the eyes of those to whom I looked confidently for preferment—from continuing the practices which had such a fascination for me, the more intensely I was secretly drawn toward them. The tug at my soul was at last almost unbearable. It was then I looked toward Chichester, and resolved to take him into my confidence—to a certain extent.

"I approached the matter craftily. I dwelt first upon the great spread of infidelity in our days, and the necessity of combating it by every legitimate means. I spoke of the efforts being made by earnest men of science—such men as Professor Stepton, for instance—to get at the truth Christians are expected to take on trust, as it were. I said I respected such men. Chichester agreed,—when did he not agree with me at that time?—but remarked that he could not help pitying them for ignoring revelation and striving to obtain by difficult means what all Christians already possessed by a glorious and final deed of gift.

"I saw that though Chichester was such a devoted worshiper of mine, if I wanted to persuade him to my secret purpose,—no other than the effort, to be made with him, to communicate with the spirit world,—I must be deceptive, I must mask my purpose with another.

"I did so. I turned his attention to the subject of the human will. Now, at that time Chichester knew that his will was weak. He considered that fact one of his serious faults. I hinted that I agreed with him. I proposed to join with him in striving to strengthen it. He envied my strength of will. He looked up to me, worshiped me almost, because of it. I drew his mind to the close consideration of influence. I gave him two or three curious works that I possessed on this subject. In one of them, a pamphlet written by a Hindu who had been partly educated at Oxford, and whom I had personally known when I was an undergraduate, there was a course of will-exercises, much as in certain books on body-building there are courses of physical exercises. I related to Chichester some of the extraordinary and deeply interesting conversations I had had with this Hindu on the subject of the education of the will, and finally I told a lie. I told Chichester that I had gained my powerful will while at Oxford by drawing it from my Hindu friend in a series of sittings that we two had secretly undertaken together. This was false, because I had been born with a strong, even a tyrannical, will, and I had never sat with the Hindu.

"Chichester, though at first startled, was fascinated by this untruth, and, to cut the matter short, I persuaded him to begin with me a series of secret sittings, in which I proposed to try to impart to him, to infuse into him, as it were, some of my undoubted power—the power which he daily saw me exercising in the pulpit and over the minds of men in my intercourse with them.

"What I really wished to do, what I meant to do, if possible, was to use Chichester as a medium, and to try through him to communicate with the spirit world. I had taken it into my head—no doubt you will say quite unreasonably—that he must be entirely subject to my will in a sitting, and that if I willed him to be entranced, it was certain that he would become so. But my own entirely selfish desires I concealed under the cloak of an unselfish wish to give power to him. I even pretended, as you see, to have a highly moral purpose, though it is true I suggested trying to effect it in an unconventional and very unecclesiastical manner.

"Chichester, though, as I have said, at first startled, of course eventually fell in with my view. We sat together in his room at Hornton Street.

"Now, Mr. Malling, some of what I have told you may appear to be almost contradictory. I have spoken of my maladie de grandeur as if it were a reason why I wished to sit with Henry Chichester, and then of my desire to communicate, if possible, with the spirit world as my reason."

"I noticed that," observed Malling, "and purposed later to point it out to you."

"How can I explain exactly? It is so difficult to unravel the web of motives in a mind. It was my maladie de grandeur, I think, that made me long to use my worshiper Chichester as a mere tool for the opening of that door which shuts off from us the region the dead have entered. My mind at that time was filled with a mingled conceit, amounting at moments almost to an intoxication, and a desire for knowledge. I reveled in my power when preaching, but was haunted by genuine doubts as to truth. My egoism longed to make an utter slave of Chichester (I nearly always lusted to push my influence to its limit). But my desire to know made me conceive the pushing of it in a direction, in this instance, which would perhaps gratify a less unworthy desire than that merely of subjugating another. The two birds and the one stone! I thought of them. I loved the idea of making a tool. I loved also the idea of using the tool when made. And I pretended I had only Chichester's moral interest at heart. I have been punished, terribly punished.

"We sat, as I say, in Hornton Street, secretly, and of course at night. My wife knew nothing of it. I made excuses to get away—parish matters, meetings, work in the East End. I had no difficulty with her. She thought my many activities would bring me ever more and more into the public eye, and she encouraged them. The people in the house where Chichester lodged were simple folk, and were ready to go early to bed, leaving rector and curate discussing their work for the salvation of bodies and souls.

"At first Chichester was reluctant, I know. I read his thoughts. He was not sure that it was right to approach such mysteries; but, as usual, I dominated him silently. And soon he fell completely under the fascination peculiar to sittings."

Again Mr. Harding paused. For a moment his head sank, his powerful body drooped, he was immersed in reverie. Malling did not interrupt him. At last, with a deep sigh, and now speaking more slowly, more unevenly, he continued:

"What happened exactly at those sittings I do not rightly know. Perhaps I shall never rightly know. What did not happen I can tell you. In the first place, although I secretly used my will upon Chichester, desiring, mentally insisting, that he should become entranced, he never was entranced when we sat together. Something within him—was it something holy? I have wondered—resisted my desire, of which, so far as I know, he was never aware. Perhaps 'beneath the threshold' he was aware. Who can say? But though my great desire was frustrated in our sittings, the desire of Chichester, so different, perhaps so much more admirable than mine, and, at any rate, not masked by any deceit, began, so it seemed, to be strangely gratified. He declared almost from the first that, when sitting with me, he felt his will power strengthened. 'You are doing me good,' he said. Now, as my professed object in contriving the sittings had been to lift up Chichester toward my level,"—with indescribable bitterness Mr. Harding dwelt on these last words,—"I could only express rejoicing. And this I did with successful hypocrisy. Nevertheless, I was greatly irritated. For it seemed to me that, when we sat, Chichester triumphed over me. He obtained his desire while mine remained ungratified. This was an outrage directed against my supremacy over him, which I had designed to increase. I gathered together my will power to check it. But in this attempt I failed.

"Nothing is stranger, I think, Mr. Malling, than the fascination of a sitting. Even when nothing, or scarcely anything, happens, the mind, the whole nature seems to be mysteriously grasped and held. New senses in you seem to be released. Something is alert which is never alert—or, at all events, never alert in the same way—in other moments of life. One seems to become inexplicably different. Chichester was aware of all this. At the first sitting nothing happened, and I feared Chichester would wish to give the matter up. But, no! When we rose from our chairs late in the night he acknowledged that he had never known two hours to pass so quickly before. At following sittings there were slight manifestations such as, I suppose, are seldom absent from such affairs,—perfectly trivial to you, of course,—movements of the table, rappings, gusts of what seemed cold air, and so forth. All that is not worth talking about, and I don't mean to trouble you further with it. My difficulty is, when so little, apparently, took place, to make you understand the tremendous thing that did happen, that must have been happening gradually during our sittings.

"At the very first, as I told you, or nearly so,—I wish to be absolutely accurate,—Chichester began to be aware of a strengthening of his will. At this time I was almost angrily unaware of any change either in him or in myself. At subsequent sittings—I speak of the earlier ones—Chichester reiterated more strongly his assertion of beneficent alteration in himself. I did not believe him, though I did believe he was absolutely sincere in his supposition. It seemed to me that he was 'suggestioned,' partly perhaps by his implicit trust in me, partly by his own desire that something curious should happen. However, still playing a part in pursuance of my resolve not to let Chichester know my real object in this matter, I pretended that I, too, perceived an alteration in him, as if his personality were strengthening. And not once, but on several occasions, I spoke of the change in him as almost exactly corresponding with the change that had taken place in me when I sat with my Hindu friend.

"All this time, with a force encouraged by the secret anger within me, I violently, at last almost furiously, willed that Chichester should become entranced.