ould be. I think a man who professes to direct the souls of others
should be more gentle and unselfish, especially to his wife. Another
quail? Well, really, I think perhaps I will. They are so absurdly small
this season, aren't they? There's scarcely anything on them."

So that minute fraction of the world that knew of the existence of the
Hardings began to utter itself concerning them, and Malling was fortified
in his original belief which he had expressed to Professor Stepton.

Among his many experiments made in connection with psychical research
those which had interested him the most had been those in which the
mystery of the human will had seemed to be deeply involved. Malling was
essentially a psychologist. And man was to him the great mystery, because
man contained surely something that belonged to, that was lent to, man,
as it were, by another, the mind beyond, the _anima mundi_. When Malling
drew mentally, or spiritually, very near to any man, however rude,
however humble, he always had the feeling that he was approaching holy
ground. Hidden beneath his generally imperturbable exterior, sunk beneath
the surface incredulity of his mind, there was the deep sense of mighty
truths waiting the appointed day of proclamation. Surely, he often
thought, if there is God in anything, in the last rays of the sunset,
in the silence of night upon the sea, in the waking of spring among the
forests and the gardens, in the song of the nightingale which knows
not lovers are listening, there is God in the will of man.

And when he made investigations into the action of will upon will, or
of will--as it seemed--upon matter, he was held, as he was not held by
the appearance of so-called spirit faces and spirit forms, even when
he could not connect these with trickery which he knew how to expose.
Perhaps, however, his incredulity in regard to these latter phenomena was
incurable, though he did not know it. For he knew nearly all the devices
of the charlatans. And when the so-called spirits came, the medium was
always entranced, that is, apparently will-less, and so to Malling not
interesting.

Now, from what Harding and Chichester had said to him, and from what
he had observed for himself, Malling believed that the two clergymen
must have had sittings together, probably with the usual tremendous
object of the ignorant amateur, that merely of communicating with the
other world. Considering who the two men were, Malling believed tha