His visitor, with the same air of deference and the same noiselessness of movement, returned to the chair. Northcote fixed two eyes of a devouring curiosity upon his bloodless face. They recoiled with a shock of encounter; two orbs flaming out of it in all their sunken brilliancy had looked within them. Also he beheld a mouth whose lips were curved with the divine mobility of a passion. The advocate clasped his hands to his sides to repress a fierce emotion of pain. “Perhaps, Mr. Iggs,” he said, “you have been down into the depths of the sea?” His visitor brushed the green canopy of his mutilated bowler hat slowly and delicately upon the threadbare sleeve of his coat. “That is true,” he said; “but I would have you not forget that I have also walked upon the peaks of the highest mountains.” The roar of Fleet Street, the sough of the icy wind through the telegraph wires, the driving of the sleet against the window, and the drip drip of the water through the ceiling seemed to blend with the rich and full tones enveloping these words. A sensation of awe began to surmount the pity and the patronage that the outer semblance of his visitor had first aroused in the breast of the young man. “With your permission, sir,” he said, “I will go back to my original question, and I will frame it with a deeper sincerity: To what does Henry Northcote owe the honor of this visit?” “This visit is paid to you, my friend, because for some inscrutable reason Nature mixed blood and fire with your brains. You, too, will go down into the depths of the sea and ascend also into the mountain places.” “You cannot know that,” said Northcote, with his heart beginning to beat violently. “Reflect a moment,” said his visitor. “Do you not know as well as I that it is the privilege of us to know everything?” “True, true! But in what manner has one so obscure as myself been brought to your notice?” “Every Sunday afternoon for a year past I have been a member of the audience your oratory has enchanted in Hyde Park.” “How comes it, sir, that one of your condition can bring himself to listen to a mob orator?” “How comes it that one of a like condition can bring himself to preach to the mob?” “Primarily, I suppose, that my powers may develop. One day I shall hope to turn them--that is, if it is given to me to survive the present snap of cold weather--to higher things and larger issues.” “And I, my friend,” said his visitor, “who by no human possibility can survive the present snap of cold weather, I come to tell the young Demosthenes that he can seek no higher thing, no larger issue than to preach to the mob. All the great movements the world ever saw began from below. The power of the sea lies in its depths. Jesus was able to invent a religion by preaching to the mob.” “There are some who think,” said the young man, “that for one who was ambitious the career of Jesus was a partial failure.” “The age is crying out for another such failure,” said his visitor.