What interested him in her was her novel and bold moral attitude, her self-respect in the midst of her sin, her striking arguments in favor of an apparently indefensible course of life.

Hers was no common case of loose living, he felt: there was a soul to be saved there, if only Heaven would raise her up a friend in some man absolutely proof against the vulgar fascination of her prettiness.

He began to imagine a certain greatness of character about her, a capacity for heroic repentance as well as for heroic sin.
Before long he was amusing himself by thinking how it might have gone with her if she had him for her counsellor instead of a gross and thoughtless rake like Marmaduke.
It is not necessary to follow the wild goose chase which the Rev.
George's imagination ran from this starting-point to the moment when he was suddenly awakened, by an unmistakable symptom, to the fact that he was being outwitted and beglamoured, like the utter novice he was, by a power which he believed to be the devil.

He rushed to the little oratory he had arranged with a screen in the corner of his sitting-room, and prayed aloud, long and earnestly.

But the hypnotizing process did not tranquilize him as usual.