ght to Ensign Sand and the other "officers" the divination that he
was one of those shyly anxious souls who have to be enticed into the
Kingdom of Heaven with wariness, and they made a great pretence of not
noticing him, going on with the exercises just as if he were not there,
a consideration which he was able richly to enhance when the plate came
round. After his first contribution, Mrs. Sand regarded his spiritual
interests with almost superstitious reverence, according them the
fullest privacy of which she was capable. The gravity which the
gentleman attached to his situation was sufficiently testified by the
"amount"; Mrs. Sand never wanted better evidence than the amount. Even
Laura, acting doubtless under instructions, seemed disposed to hold
away from him in her prayers and exhortations; only a very occasional
allusion passed her lips which Duff could appropriate. These, when they
fell, he gathered and set like flowers in his tenderest consciousness,
to visit and water them after the sun went down and for twenty-four
hours he would not see her again. Her intonation went with them and her
face; they lived on that. They stirred him, I mean, least of all in the
manner of their intention. After the first quarter of an hour, it is
to be feared, Lindsay suffered no more apprehensions on the score of
emotional hypnotism. He recognised his situation plainly enough, and
there was no appeal in it of which the Reverend Stephen Arnold, for
example, could properly suspect the genuineness or the permanence.

On this Saturday night he sat through the meeting as he had sat through
other meetings, absorbed in his exquisite experience which he meditated
mostly with his eyes on the floor. His attitude was one quite adapted
to deceive Ensign Sand; if he had been occupied with the burden of his
transgressions it was one he might very well have fallen into. When
Laura knelt or sang he sometimes looked at her, at other times he looked
at the situation in the brightness of her presence at the other end of
the room. She gave forth there, for Lindsay, an illumination by which he
almost immediately began to read his life; and it was because he thought
he had done this with accuracy and intelligence that he came up behind
her that evening when the meeting was over as she followed the rest,
with her sari drawn over her head, out into the darkness of Bentinck
Street, and said with directness, "I should like to come and see you.
When may I? An