last bit of quiet water across which a landing to the bank might still
have been possible.

Faint streamers from the dark, inscrutable house of fear reached him even
then and left their vague, undecipherable signatures upon the surface of
his soul. The forces that vibrated so strangely in the atmosphere of Mr.
Skale were already playing about his own person, gathering him in like a
garment. Yet while he shuddered, he liked it. Was he not already losing
something of his own insignificant and diminutive self?


IV

The clergyman, meanwhile, had closed the heavy door, shutting out the
darkness, and now led the way across a large, flagged hall into a room,
ablaze with lamp and fire, the walls lined thickly with books, furnished
cozily if plainly. The laden tea table, and a kettle hissing merrily on
the hob, were pleasant to look upon, but what instantly arrested the gaze
of the secretary was the face of the old woman in cap and
apron--evidently the housekeeper already referred to as "Mrs." Mawle--who
stood waiting to pour out tea. For about her worn and wrinkled
countenance there lay an indefinable touch of something that hitherto he
had seen only in pictures of the saints by the old masters. What
attracted his attention, and held it so arrestingly, was this singular
expression of happiness, aye, of more than mere happiness--of joy and
peace and blessed surety, rarely, if ever, seen upon a human face alive,
and only here and there suggested behind that mask of repose which death
leaves so tenderly upon the features of those few who have lived their
lives to noblest advantage.