im!" 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?"

"Well, what if I was?" snapped the professor, moving in his chair.

"Marcus Harding could not make a move to get rid of me. There was a link
between us which he could not even try to break.

"One night--one night--I discovered what that link was."

It was growing dark in the room. The Rossetti Madonna, thin, anemic,
with hanging hair, seemed fading away on the somber, green wall. The
window-panes looked spectral and white. The faint murmur of the city
sounded a little deeper and much sadder than in the light of day.
Stepton was aware of a furtive but strong desire for artificial light in
the room, but he did not choose to mention it. And Chichester, whose
voice--so it seemed to his hearer--began to have that peculiar almost
alarming timbre which belongs to a voice speaking not for the ears of
another, but for the satisfaction only of the soul which it expresses,
continued his narrative, or confession, as if unaware of the dying of
day.

"During the day which preceded it I had been haunted by the thought of
myself doing what Marcus Harding could not do. Why should not I of my own
will leave St. Joseph's, get away from this dreadful contemplation which
obsessed me, from this continual anxiety--almost amounting to terror at
moments--which gnawed me? Why should not I break this mysterious link,
impalpable yet strong? If I did, should I not again find peace? But my
sittings with Marcus Harding would be at an