“I’ll tell you the rest.  When Marcus Harding’s steps died away down the street I remained here.  Since that shock I have spoken of, I felt that I was again Henry Chichester, changed, as I had long been changed—­charged with new force, new knowledge, new discrimination, new power over others, gifted with a penetrating vision into the very soul of the man I had worshiped, yet Henry Chichester.  And as Henry Chichester I suffered; I condemned myself.  This I said to myself that night, ’I was determined to see.  I disregarded the voice within me which warned me that I was treading a forbidden path.  God has punished me.  He has allowed me to see.  But this shall be the end.  I will never sit again.  I will give up my curacy.  I will leave St. Joseph’s at once.  Never more will I set eyes on Marcus Harding.’  I was in a condition of fierce excitement—­”

“Ah, exactly,” muttered the professor, almost as if consoled—­“fierce excitement!”

“I could not think of sleep.  For a long time I remained in here, sitting, standing, pacing, opening books; I scarcely know what I did or did not do.  At last a sensation of terrible exhaustion crept over me.  I undressed.  I threw myself on my bed.  I tried to sleep.  I turned, shifted, got up, let in more air, again lay down, lay resolutely still in the dark, tried not to think.  But always my mind dwelt on that matter.  In those few frightful moments what had become of myself, of Henry Chichester?  Had the powerful personality of that man whom once I had almost worshiped thrust him away, submerged him, stricken him down in a sort of deathlike trance?  What I had seen I remembered now as Henry Chichester.  What I had known in those moments I still knew now as Henry Chichester.  In vain I revolved this matter in my feverish mind.  It was too much for me.  I was in deep waters.

“I closed my eyes.  The fatigue wrapped me more closely.  Sleep at last was surely drawing near.  But suddenly I knew—­how I cannot exactly say—­that once more the shutter was to be drawn back for me.  This knowledge resembled a horrible physical sensation.  The entry of it into my mind, or indeed into my very soul, was as the dawning of a dreadful and unnatural pain in the body.  This pain increased till it became agony.  Although I still lay motionless, I felt like one involved in a furious struggle in which the whole sum of me took violent part.  And there came to me the simile of a man seized by tremendous hands, and held before a window opening into a room in which something frightful was about to take place.  And the shutter slipped back from the window.

“Again I looked upon myself.  That was my exact sensation.  The shutter drawn back, I assisted at the spectacle of Marcus Harding’s life.  And it was my life.  I knew with such frightful intimacy that my knowledge was as vision.  Therefore, I say, I saw.  Not only my spirit seemed to be gazing, but also my bodily eyes.

“I saw myself in the night slowly approaching my house in Onslow Gardens, ashen pale, shaken, terrified.  At a corner I passed a policeman.  He knew me and saluted me with respect.  I made no gesture in response.  He stared at me in surprise.  Then a smile came into his face—­the smile of a man who is suddenly able to think much less of another than he thought before.  I left him smiling thus, reached my house, and stood before it.