Meanwhile Stepton had forgotten all about Malling. He was full of work
of various kinds, but the work that most interested him was connected
with the reverend gentlemen of St. Joseph's. As Malling surmised, he had
lost little time in beginning his "approach," and that approach had been
rather circuitous. He had taken his own advice and studied the link.
This done, the intricate and fascinating subject of nervous dyspepsia
had claimed his undivided attention. When he had finished his prolonged
interview with Blandford Sikes, sidling back to the waiting-room to
gather up various impedimenta, he had encountered the unfortunate
clergyman whom he had kept waiting. Marcus Harding was the man. They
exchanged only a couple of words, but the sight of the flaccid bulk,
the hanging cheeks and hands, the eyes in which dwelt a sort of faded
despair, whipped up into keen alertness every faculty of the professor's
mind. As he walked into Cavendish Square he muttered to himself:

"I never saw a clergyman look more promising for investigation, by Jove!
Never! There's something in it. Malling was not entirely wrong. There's
certainly something in it."

But what? Now for Henry Chichester!

Stepton was by nature unemotional, but he was an implicit believer in
the hysteria of others, and he thought clergymen, as a class, more liable
to that malady than other classes of men. Curates, being as a rule young
clergymen, were, in his view, specially subject to the inroads of the
cloudy complaint, which causes the mind to see mountains where only
mole-hills exist, and to appreciate anything more readily and accurately
than the naked truth. Henry Chichester was young and he was a curate.
He was therefore likely to be emotional and to be attracted by the
mysterious, more especially since he had recently been knocking on
its door, according to Malling's statement.

After a good deal of thought, the professor resolved to cast aside
convention, and to make Chichester's acquaintance without any
introduction; indeed, with the maximum of informality.

He learned something about Chichester's habits, and managed to meet him
several times when he was walking from the daily service at St. Joseph's
to his rooms in Hornton Street. In this walk Chichester passed the South
Kensington Museum. What more natural than that the professor should
chance to be coming out of it?

The first time they met, Stepton looked at the curate casually, the
second time more sh