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 detail,” 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.”