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.