Mr. Trimblerigg, keeping his head in the light of the window, gave her the required instructions, and saw at once from the uneventful expression of her face that she had noticed nothing. This threw him suddenly back upon doubt; and no sooner had she returned to her kitchen than he ran upstairs again, and looked once more in the glass. The visitation was still upon him; but now that there was more daylight he saw it much less; nor had it so definite an edge where the radiance left off. Had he been a woman a broad-brimmed hat with plenty of veil about it would have made what was there quite unnoticeable; or had he been a missionary in India wearing a turban in all the glare of the Eastern sun. But fate had decreed otherwise; the environment he had to face was not of so obscuring a kind. Then all at once the thought occurred to him--what would it be like at night? He drew down blinds, closed curtains, and went back to the glass. The vivid result made him realize, with a shock, the actual state at which his mind had now arrived with regard to facing his fellow-men. ‘I shan’t be able to go out at night,’ he said to himself. ‘I should frighten people.’ But as a matter of fact he was getting frightened himself. He knew definitely now that he wished it had not happened: and so, being of that mind, more and more did he entreat to be told how it could have happened. Was it from his brain, or his body, or his soul, that these rays emanated; and were they a symptom--physical, mental, or spiritual--of sickness or health; and if of sickness, were they to be temporary or permanent? So he debated; yet when it came to addressing himself directly to the possible source of all this trouble, he was hesitant what to do. He did not wish to seem ungrateful, or to confess to moral cowardice, or even to plead the most plausible excuse--that he was unworthy; and so after hesitating for awhile he kept his thoughts unobtrusively to himself on the earthly plane. What never struck him for a moment was that he had done this himself--that, just as when you put water in a kettle upon the fire, it boils till presently it boils over, so if you put self-belief and self-worship into an ebullient and imaginative brain, the belief will out, like murder, in one form or another; and as pictorial imagery was Mr. Trimblerigg’s strong point--to the point, one may say, of intoxication--this halo was but the bouquet or visible fragrance of the life within. And just as his own and his wife’s mirror between them reflected it with accuracy and completeness, with equal accuracy and completeness it reflected him.