earful compulsion to remain was
upon me. I wrote a few words. I stopped, tore the note up, began again.
But writing was impossible. Then I resolved to visit Marcus Harding and
to tell him that I must go. I went to his house. He was at home. When I
saw him I told him that I wished him to sit again that night. He strove
to refuse. He did not understand the truth, but he was terrified. I
ordered him to come to my rooms that night, and left him. As I was going
away I met Lady Sophia. To my amazement, she stopped me, spoke to me
kindly, even more than kindly, looked at me with an expression in her
eyes that almost frightened me. I said to myself, 'But those are a
slave's eyes!' as I left her. Never before had any woman looked at me
like that. In that moment, I think, she began to turn from him toward
me, to forsake weakness for strength. Yes, I say strength. I was rent by
the tumult within me, but I had strength. I have it now. For, despite
his hypocrisy, his unbelief, his active sinning, Marcus Harding had been
a strong man. And even Henry Chichester, with all his humbleness, his
readiness to yield to others, to think nothing of himself, had had the
strength that belongs to purity of soul. And then there is the strength
the soul draws from looking upon truth. There was strength, there is now,
for the woman to follow. And instinct has surely guided her. She does
not, she cannot know. And yet instinct sends her in search of the
strength."

"What do you mean by that? What do you claim?"

"You read that sermon?"

"I did."

"Don't you understand? I am that man at the window. He did not flee
away. He could not. He was, he is, compelled to remain. He watches that
dreadful life. And the other within the room is fading. The strength,
the authority, the power, are coming to me. Every sitting broadens that
bridge across which the deserters are passing. When I preached that
sermon my congregation sat as if numbed by terror. And he in the choir
listened, never moving. I saw his spirit, dazed, stretching out to grasp
the truth, slipping back powerless to do it. It was like a thing moving
through the gloom of deep waters--of deep, deep waters."

Again Chichester's voice died away. In the silence that followed the
professor heard the faint ticking of a clock. He had not noticed it
before. He could not tell now whether it came from within the room or
from the room behind the folding-doors. It seemed to him as if this
ticking destroyed