“We must sit again,” I replied.

“Marcus Harding turned scarlet with anger.  He looked at me.  He opened his lips to speak.  I let him speak.  I even argued the question with him.  I pointed out to him that his only design—­the only design acknowledged by him, at any rate, in beginning these practices—­had been to give me strength such as, he had declared to me, he himself had drawn while at Oxford from a Hindu comrade.  In carrying out this design, I now told him, he was being successful.  I felt that I was growing in power of will, in self-confidence.  How, then, could he refuse to continue when success was already in sight?  ‘Unless,’ I concluded, ’you had some other design in persuading me to sit, which I did in the first instance against my secret desire, and you feel that there is now no probability of carrying that design into effect.’

“He gave in.  I had him beaten.  Hastily he muttered a good-night and left me.  I let him out into the night.  As soon as the street door had shut on him I ran upstairs.  I went to that window,—­” Chichester flung out his hand—­“pushed it up, leaned out, and watched him down the street.  I saw him pass under a gas-lamp and I said to myself:  ’You have submitted to my will, and you shall submit again.  I am the master now.’

“In that moment all the domination which I had so joyously endured, which I had even surely reveled in,—­for there are those who can revel in their slavery,—­abruptly became in my mind a reason for revenge.  Marcus Harding disappeared in the night; but still I leaned out, staring down the way he had gone, and thinking, ’You shall pay me back for it.  You shall pay me back.’

“From that night I made no effort to check the critical faculty, the exercise of which at first had seemed to me a sort of treachery.  And as I let myself criticize, I saw more clearly.  The scales fell from my eyes.  I realized that I had been nothing less than blind in regard to Marcus Harding.  I saw him now as he was, a victim of egomania, a worldling, tyrannical, falsely sentimental, and unfaithful steward, a liar—­perhaps even an unbeliever.  His whole desire—­I knew it now—­was not to be good, but to be successful.  His charity, his pity for the poor, his generosity, his care for his church, for his schools—­all was pretence.  I saw Marcus Harding as he was.  And what followed?”

Chichester leaned forward to the professor.

“Fear followed,” he said in a withdrawn voice.

“Fear!” said Stepton, clearing his throat with a loud, rasping noise.

“Whenever I was with Marcus Harding in any public place I was now companioned by fear.  I dreaded unspeakably lest others should begin to see what I saw.  When he preached, I could hardly sit to listen:  I felt as if any shame falling upon him would overwhelm me also.  I strove in vain to combat this strange, this, then, inexplicable sensation.  With every sitting this terror grew upon me.  It tortured