e
slightest hold upon her, and I really believe I should have been
altogether baffled, had not the rector unconsciously come to my aid.

All through the prayers and psalms I had fought a desperate fight without
gaining a single inch. Then the rector walked over to the lectern, and
the moment he opened his mouth I knew that my time had come, and that
there was a very fair chance of victory before me. Whether this
clergyman had a toothache, or a headache, or a heavy load on his mind, I
cannot say, but his reading was more lugubrious than the wind in an
equinoctial gale. I have since observed that he was only a degree worse
than many other clerical readers, and that a strange and delightfully
mistaken notion seems prevalent that the Bible must be read in a dreary
and unnatural tone of voice, or with a sort of mournful monotony; it is
intended as a sort of reverence, but I suspect that it often plays into
the hands of my progenitor, as it most assuredly did in the present
instance.

Hardly had the rector announced, "Here beginneth the forty-fourth verse
of the sixteenth chapter of the book of the prophet Ezekiel," than a sort
of relaxation took place in the mind I was attacking. Lena Houghton's
attention could only have been given to the drearily read lesson by a
very great effort; she was a little lazy and did not make the effort, she
thought how nice it was to sit down again, and then the melancholy voice
lulled her into a vague interval of thoughtless inactivity. I promptly
seized my opportunity, and in a moment her whole mind was full of me. She
was an excitable, impressionable sort of girl, and when once I had
obtained an entrance into her mind I found it the easiest thing in the
world to dominate her thoughts. Though she stood, and sat, and knelt,
and curtseyed, and articulated words, her thoughts were entirely absorbed
in me. I crowded out the Magnificat with a picture of Zaluski and
Gertrude Morley. I led her through more terrible future possibilities in
the second lesson than would be required for a three-volume novel. I
entirely eclipsed the collects with reflections on unhappy marriages;
took her off _via_ Russia and Nihilism in the State prayers, and by the
time we arrived at St. Chrysostom had become so powerful that I had
worked her mind into exactly the condition I desired.

The congregation rose. Lena Houghton, still dominated by me, knelt
longer than the rest, but at last she got up and walked