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.