“It doesn’t matter. He expects me.” I felt reluctant to give my name. The servant did not press me to, but disappeared upstairs. She came back very soon and asked me to “step this way,” and I obeyed her nervously. I entered a room and heard the door close behind me, as a man rose from a table near the window, removing a green shade from his forehead. I was conscious of tired eyes that looked at me out of a pale, dim, emaciated face, but the flickering light that had seemed to shine through them when he was preaching was not there, and his manner of greeting me struck me as a little distant, a little chilly. I sat down on the extreme edge of a chair and my impressions grew clearer. “You are Peter Waring, are you not?” “Yes,” I answered. He had taken the chair opposite mine, and he leaned a little forward, the tips of his fingers joined, and blue veins showing under the loose yellow skin of his hands. He was much older than I had imagined. He was wearing a threadbare jacket which I did not like, and I noticed that one of the buttons near the top was not the same as the others. My confidence had suddenly drooped. I glanced round at the unfamiliar room, at the book-shelves which made but a poor show, and maintained an idiotic silence. It struck me that he might think I had come for a subscription towards a cricket club. “I got your letter,” he said. “You want to speak to me? You are not a member of my congregation, I think?” “No――I come sometimes in the evening.” I was glad I had said nothing in my letter but that I wanted to speak to him, and he evidently hadn’t the least suspicion of the truth. “Yes――yes――I understand. Well, don’t be afraid. If I can do anything for you I shall be very glad, very glad.” I thanked him and again became silent. It would have been absolutely impossible for me to have said what I had come to say. He was too old, too far away. It would have been like stretching out one’s hands to warm them at the ashes in an early morning grate. I knew he wanted to be kind, but I felt, somehow, that if I sat very still he would, in a minute or two, forget I was in the room. “I think I had better write,” I murmured. “Write? But why? What is it about?” he spoke almost testily. There was a tap at the door, and a thin, middle-aged lady, possibly a daughter, came in with a little tray on which were some biscuits and a tumbler of hot milk. She bowed to me and wished me good-evening. I wanted nothing now but to get away as quickly as possible, and I envied her as she went out, closing the door softly behind her. Suppose I had been in the middle of my confession when the hot milk came in, I thought. The whole thing was somehow becoming lugubriously comic. “Are you in business or at school?” Mr. Applin asked, between two sips of milk. “I hope you’ll excuse me taking this while it is hot, but I had a funeral this afternoon, and I’m afraid I caught a slight chill.”