IV.


The time came, before the following winter, when Hewson was tempted
beyond his strength, and told the story of his apparition. He told it
more than once, and kept himself with increasing difficulty from lying
about it. He always wished to add something, to amplify the fact, to
heighten the mystery of the circumstances, to divine the occult
significance of the incident. In itself the incident, when stated, was
rather bare and insufficient; but he held himself rigidly to the actual
details, and he felt that in this at least he was offering the powers
which had vouchsafed him the experience a species of atonement for
breaking faith with them. It seemed like breaking faith with Miss
Hernshaw, too, though this impression would have been harder to reason
than the other. Both impressions began to wear off after the first
tellings of the story; the wound that Hewson gave his sensibility in the
very first cicatrized before the second, and at the fourth or fifth it
had quite calloused over; so that he did not mind anything so much as
what always seemed to him the inadequate effect of his experience with
his hearers. Some listened carelessly; some nervously; some
incredulously, as if he were trying to put up a job on them; some
compassionately, as if he were not quite right, and ought to be looked
after. There was a consensus of opinion, among those who offered any sort
of comment, that he ought to give it to the Psychical Research, and at
the bottom of Hewson's heart, there was a dread that the spiritualists
would somehow get hold of him. This remained to stay him, when the shame
of breaking faith with Miss Hernshaw and with Mystery no longer
restrained him from exploiting the fact. He was aware of lying in wait
for opportunities of telling it, and he swore himself to tell it only