f we have a little air?" he added.

"I should like it," said Malling.

Chichester came back and sat down again opposite Malling. His
expression had now quite changed. He looked calmer, gentler, weaker,
and much more uninteresting. Crossing his legs, and folding his thin
hands on his knees, he began to talk in his light tenor voice. And
he kept the conversation going on church music, sacred art in Italy,
and other eminently safe and respectable topics till it was time for
Malling to go.

Only when he was letting his guest out into the night did he seem
troubled once more. He clasped Malling's hand in his, as if almost
unaware that he was doing so, and said with some hesitation:

"Are you--are you going to see the rector again?"

"Not that I know of," said Malling, speaking the strict truth, and
virtually telling a lie at the same time.

For he was determined, if possible, to see Mr. Harding, and that before
very long.

"If I may say so," Chichester said, shifting from one foot to another and
looking down at the rain-sodden pavement, "I wouldn't see him."

"May I ask you why?"

"You may get a wrong impression. Two years ago he was another man.
Strangers, of course, may not know it, not realize it. But we who have
lived with him do know it. Mr. Harding is going down the hill."

There was a note of deep sadness in his voice. Had he been speaking of
himself, of his own decadence, his tone could scarcely have been more
melancholy.

And for long Malling remembered the look in his eyes as he drew back to
shut his door.

In the rain Malling walked home as he had come. But now it was deep in
the night and his depression had deepened. He was a self-reliant man, and
not easily felt himself small, though he was not conceited. To-night he
felt diminished. The worm-sensation overcame him. That such a man as
Chichester should have been able to convey to him such a sensation was
strange, yet it was from Chichester that this mental chastisement had
come. For a moment Chichester had towered, and at that moment Malling
surely had dwindled, shrunk together, like a sheet of paper exposed to
the heat of a flame.

But that Chichester should have had such an effect on him--Malling!

If Mr. Harding was going down the hill, Chichester surely was not. He had
changed drastically since Malling had known him two years ago. In power,
in force, he had gained. He now conveyed the impression of a man capable,
if he chose, of imposing hi