me.  It obsessed me.  It drove me into action.  When I was with my rector, I tried perpetually to prevent him from exposing his true self to the world, by changing the conversation, by attenuating his remarks, by covering up his actions with my own, sometimes even by a brusque interruption.  But in the pulpit he escaped from me.  I was forced to sit silent and to listen while he preached doctrine in which he had no belief, and put forward theories of salvation, redemption by faith, and the like, which meant less than nothing to him.  Finding this presently unendurable by me, I strove to govern him mentally when he was in the pulpit, to track him, as it were, with my mind, to head him off with my mind when he was beginning to take the wrong path.”

“Did you succeed in that effort?” interrupted the professor.

“I made an impression, a terrible impression, upon him.  I almost broke him down.  I sapped his self-confidence.  His power as a preacher deserted him, as his power outside the pulpit deserted him.  With every day I felt that I saw more clearly into every recess, every cranny, of his mind and nature.  Just at first this frightfully clear sight was mine only when we were sitting; but presently it was mine whenever I was with him.  And he knew it, and went in fear of me.  Gradually, very gradually, it came about that our former positions were reversed; for as he sank down in the human scale, I mounted.  As he lost in power, I gained.  And especially in the pulpit I felt that now I had force, that I could grip my hearers, could make a mighty impression upon those with whom I was brought into contact.

“But I must tell you that now I gained no satisfaction from my own improvement, if so it may be called.  My whole life was vitiated by my secret terror lest Marcus Harding should be found out, should ever be known for what he was.  His actions, and even his thoughts, affected me with an intimacy that was inexplicable.”

“You were in telepathic communication with him!” interjected Stepton.

“Call it so if you like.  Often I felt what he was thinking, almost as if each thought of his were a hand laid upon me—­a hand from which I shrank with an almost trembling repugnance.  Sometimes when he thought something contemptible or evil, I shrank as if from a blow.

“There was a link between us.  Presently, soon, I knew it.  We seemed in some dreadful way to belong to each other, so that whatever was thought, said, done by him, whatever happened to him, reacted upon me.

“At this time Lady Sophia Harding hated me with a deadly hatred.  Formerly she had been indifferent to me.  Concentrated upon her husband, adoring him, vain of him, greedily ambitious for his advancement, she had had no time to bestow on a clerical nonentity.  But as I grew to understand what her husband really was she grew to hate me.  She was almost rude to me.  She spoke ill of me behind my back.  She even tried to oust me from my position as senior curate of St. Joseph’s.  Why did not she succeed?  Are you thinking that?”