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?”