't pretend that I didn't realize that."

"You didn't hear him at all. He wasn't himself--simply."

She sat down on a sofa and clasped her hands together.

"I cannot tell you what I was feeling," she added. "And he used to be so
full of self-confidence. It was his great gift. His self-confidence
carried him through everything. Nothing could have kept him back if--"

Suddenly she checked herself and looked, with a sort of covert inquiry,
at Malling.

"You must think me quite mad to talk like this," she said, with a return
to her manner when he first met her.

"Shall I tell you what I really think?" he asked, leaning forward in the
chair he had taken.

"Yes, do, do!"

"I think you are very ambitious for your husband and that your ambition
for him has received a perhaps mysterious--check."

Before she could reply the door opened and Mr. Harding reappeared.

At lunch he carefully avoided any reference to church matters, and
they talked on general subjects. Lady Sophia showed herself a nervously
intelligent and ardent woman. It seemed to Malling obvious that she was
devoted to her husband, "wrapped up in" him--to use an expressive phrase.
Any failure on his part upset her even more than it did him. Secretly she
must still be quivering from the public distresses of the morning. But
she now strove to aid the rector's admirable effort to be serene, and
proved herself a clever talker, and well informed on the events of the
day. Of her Malling got a fairly clear impression.

But his impression of her husband was confused and almost nebulous.

"Do you smoke?" asked Mr. Harding, when lunch was over.

Malling said that he did.

"Then come and have a cigar in my study."

"Yes, do go," said Lady Sophia. "A quiet talk with you will rest my
husband."

And she went away, leaving the two men together.

Mr. Harding's study looked out at the back of the house upon a tiny strip
of garden. It was very comfortably, though not luxuriously, furnished,
and the walls were lined with bookcases. While his host went to a drawer
to get the cigar-box, Malling idly cast his eyes over the books in the
shelves nearest to him. He always liked to see what a man had to read.
The first book his eyes rested upon was Myers's "Human Personality."
Then came a series of works by Hudson, including "Psychic Phenomena,"
then Oliver Lodge's "Survival of Man," "Man and the Universe," and "Life
and Matter." Farther along were works by Lowes Dickinson