ole ceremony. I felt--I
knew that you were--strong." She paused, alarmed at her own timidity;
and again their eyes met.

"And why have you never come to me before?" He had no particular meaning
in the question; he was only conscious of an inexplicable wish to
prolong the interview.

"Oh, I don't know--I scarcely know." Again she spoke quickly and
nervously. "I have come every night to hear you speak--I have loved to
hear you speak. But--but to be alone with you--" She paused,
expressively. "It is all so strange--so extraordinary. It doesn't seem
to belong to the present day--" She looked up at him in appealing
perplexity.

"And why did you come now?"

"Why? Oh, because--because I could not stay away."

For the first time the Prophet was conscious of a tremor of
discomfiture; for the first time the spectacle of his fraud, as seen
from a point of view other than his own, touched him unpleasantly. He
moved slightly in his massive chair.

"In this life," he said, with a sudden, almost incontinent assumption of
his Prophetic manner, "we must be ever careful to distinguish the Wine
from the Vessel that contains it. I endeavor, with all the Power I am
possessed of, to impress upon my People that I have come, not to _be_
the Way, but to _show_ the Way! To teach you all that what you seek in
me, is in each one of you. Every man is his own Prophet, if he but knew
it!" As he spoke he turned his eyes upon the Scitsym, and the hard,
inscrutable look that so dominated his followers descended upon his
face. As he reached the last words, he glanced again at his companion,
but as his eyes rested on her face he paused disconcerted. She was
gazing at him with a candid, spontaneous admiration infinitely more
human and infinitely more irresistible than the neurotic adoration that
was daily lavished on him. With an odd, inexplicable sense of guilt, he
rose quickly from his seat.

"Do not forget--do not allow yourself to forget that this is my
teaching," he said. "That you have each within yourselves the thing you
demand in me. Look for it within yourselves! Rely upon yourselves!"

As he ceased, she also rose. She was pale, and trembled slightly.

"But if one cannot follow that teaching?" she asked. "If one longs to
rely upon some one else? If one cannot rely upon one's self?"

The Prophet made no answer. He stood with one hand resting on the table,
his gaze fixed upon the book.

Emboldened by his silence, she approached him by