“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.”