"Again and again we sat. My hostile feeling grew. My critical feeling grew. My longing to tyrannize increased, till I was almost afraid of it, so cruel did I feel it to be. 'Down! Down under my feet!' That was what my soul was secretly saying now to the man whose will had been as law to me. And one night, as if he heard that ugly voice of my soul, he abruptly got up from the table and said: 'It seems to me that you and I are not _en rapport_. It seems to me that no more good can come of these sittings. We had better not sit again." "We must sit again," I replied. "Marcus Harding turned scarlet with anger. He looked at me. He opened his lips to speak. I let him speak. I even argued the question with him. I pointed out to him that his only design--the only design acknowledged by him, at any rate, in beginning these practices--had been to give me strength such as, he had declared to me, he himself had drawn while at Oxford from a Hindu comrade. In carrying out this design, I now told him, he was being successful. I felt that I was growing in power of will, in self-confidence. How, then, could he refuse to continue when success was already in sight? 'Unless,' I concluded, 'you had some other design in persuading me to sit, which I did in the first instance against my secret desire, and you feel that there is now no probability of carrying that design into effect.' "He gave in. I had him beaten. Hastily he muttered a good-night and left me. I let him out into the night. As soon as the street door had shut on him I ran upstairs. I went to that window,--" Chichester flung out his hand--"pushed it up, leaned out, and watched him down the street. I saw him pass under a gas-lamp and I said to myself: 'You have submitted to my will, and you shall submit again. I am the master now.' "In that moment all the domination which I had so joyously endured, which I had even surely reveled in,--for there are those who can revel in their slavery,--abruptly became in my mind a reason for revenge. Marcus Harding disappeared in the night; but still I leaned out, staring down the way he had gone, and thinking, 'You shall pay me back for it. You shall pay me back.' "From that night I made no effort to check the critical faculty, the exercise of which at first had seemed to me a sort of treachery. And as I let myself criticize, I saw more clearly. The scales fell from my eyes. I realized that I had been nothing less than blind in regard to Marcus Harding. I saw him now as he was, a victim of egomania, a worldling, tyrannical, falsely sentimental, and unfaithful steward, a liar--perhaps even an unbeliever. His whole desire--I knew it now--was not to be good, but to be successful. His charity, his pity for the poor, his generosity, his care for his church, for his schools--all was pretence. I saw Marcus Harding as he was. And what followed?" Chichester leaned forward to the professor. "Fear followed," he said in a withdrawn voice.