ittings. We had better not sit again."

"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"Fear followed," he said in a withdrawn