t in
all probability they had sat alone and in secret. He also felt little
doubt that from Mr. Harding's brain had come the suggestion of these
practices, that his will had led Chichester on to them. Although he
had not known the rector two years ago, he had gathered sufficient
testimony to the fact that he had been a man of powerful, even perhaps
of tyrannical, temperament, formed rather to rule than to be ruled. He
knew that Chichester, on the contrary, had been gentle, kindly, yielding,
and of somewhat weak, though of very amiable, nature. The physique of the
two men accorded with these former temperaments. Harding's commanding
height, large frame, big, powerful face and head, rather hard gray eyes,
even his large white teeth, his bony, determined hands, his firmly
treading feet, suggested force, a dominating will, the capacity, and
the intention, to rule. Henry Chichester's fleshly envelop, on the other
hand, cherubic, fair, and delicate, his blue eyes, small bones, the shape
of forehead and chin, the line of the lips, hinted at--surely more than
that, surely stated mildly--the existence within it of a nature retiring,
meek, and ready to be ruled by others. No wonder if Chichester had been,
as Lady Mansford had said, completely under the rector's thumb, no wonder
if he had been unable to "call his soul his own" and had "worshiped
Marcus."

Yes, if there had been these secret sittings by these two men, it was
Harding who had persuaded Chichester to take part in them. And what had
these sittings led to, what had been their result?

The ignorant outsider, the hastily skeptical, of course would say that
there could have been no result. Malling, knowing more, knew better. He
had seen strange cases of temporary confusion of a man's will brought
about by sittings, of what had seemed temporary change even of a man's
nature. When a hitherto sane man goes mad he often becomes the opposite
of what he was. Those whom he formerly loved he specially singles out
for hatred. That which he delighted to do he shrinks from with horror.
Once good-natured, he is now of an evil temper, once gentle, he is
fiercely obstinate, once gay, he cowers and weeps. So Malling had known
a man, while retaining his sanity, to be transformed by the apparently
trivial fact of sitting at a table with a friend, and placing his hands
upon it with the hands of another man. He himself had sat with an Oxford
friend,--who in later sittings became entranced,--