rose into his range of vision, and stood for a moment so that he
could see her clearly, smiling, talking, making little gestures that
he knew, carrying her hand to her face, stretching it out, dropping it.
Finally she lifted it to her lips, half-closing her eyes at the same
time, took it away quickly, with a sort of butterfly motion, and
vanished, going toward the left, where the room door was.

So had she many and many a time bidden him, her husband, good night.
Instantly, with an impulse which seemed combined of rage and terror,
both now full of a driving force which was irresistible, the man sprang
forward to the window, seized the stone coping with his hands and stared
into his room.

Seated in a round chair at his writing-table, by a lamp with a green
shade, was the man who had entered his house. He was writing busily in
a book with a silver clasp that could be locked with a key, and he leaned
a little over the table with his head turned away. The shape of his head,
his posture, even the manner in which he used his pen as he traced line
after line in the book, made an abominable impression upon the man
staring in at the window. But the face--the face! He must see that! And
he leaned forward, trembling, but fiercely, and, pressing his own face
against the pane, he looked at the occupant of his room as men look
sometimes with their souls.

The man at the table lifted his head. He laid down the pen, blotted the
book in which he had been writing, shut it up, clasped it, locked it with
a tiny key, and put it carefully into a drawer of the table, which also
he locked. He got up, stood for an instant by the table with one hand
upon it, then turned slowly toward the window, smiling, as men smile to
themselves when they are thinking of their own ingenuities.

The man outside the window fell back into the snow as if God's hand had
touched him. He had seen his own face! So he smiled sometimes at the end
of a day, when he had finished writing down in his diary some of the
hidden things of his life.

He turned, and as the window through which he had been looking suddenly
darkened, he fled away into the night.

When the lights, which at St. Joseph's were always kept lowered during
the sermon, once more strongly illuminated the chancel, Mr. Harding
turned a ghastly face toward the pulpit. In the morning Chichester had
listened to him, as a man of truth might listen to a man who is trying
to lie, but who cannot deceive him.