y the love of Thy dear Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and by the promise
of Thy second coming, we beseech Thee" ... finished Mr. Warlock.

During all this time the atmosphere of the Chapel had been growing
hotter and hotter and closer and closer. It had always its air of being
buried deep under ground, bathed in a kind of sunken heat that found
its voice in the gas that hissed and sizzled overhead; near the door
was a long rail on which coats might be hung, and now these garments
could be seen, swaying a little to and fro, like corpses of condemned
men.

The bare ugliness of the building with its stone walls, its rows of
wooden seats, its grey windows, its iron-hung gas-lamps, its ugly desk
and platform, was veiled now in a thin steaming heat that rose mistily
above the heads of the kneeling congregation and seemed to hide strange
shapes and shadows in its shifting depths. Every one was swimming in an
uncertain world; the unreality grew with the heat. Maggie herself, at
the end of Mr. Warlock's prayer, felt that her test of a real solid and
unimaginative world was leaving her. She was expectant like the rest,
as ready to believe anything at all.

Out of the mist rose Mr. Crashaw. This was a little old man with a
crabbed face and a body that seemed to have endured infernal twistings
in some Inquisitioner's torture-chamber. Maggie learnt afterwards that
he had suffered for many years from intolerable rheumatism, but
to-night the contortions and windings of the body with which he climbed
up onto the platform, and then the grimaces that he made as his large
round head peered over the top of the desk, might have struck any less
solemn assemblage as farcical. He wore an old shiny black frock coat
and a white rather grimy tie fastened in a sharp little bow. His face
was lined like a map, his cheeks seamed and furrowed, his forehead a
wilderness of marks, his scanty hair brushed straight back so that the
top of his forehead seemed unnaturally shiny and bald; his hands, with
which he clutched the side of his desk, were brown and wrinkled and
grasping like a monkey's. His eyes were the eyes of a fanatic, but they
were not steady and speculative like Warlock's or glowing and distant
like Aunt Anne's, but rather angry and restless and pugnacious; they
were the eyes of a madman, but of a madman who can yet calculate upon
and arrange his position in the world. He was mad for his own purposes,
and could, for these same purposes, bind h