When he climbed into the pulpit he tried again to discover Maggie's face as he had already seen it.He could not; it had been, perhaps, a trick of light and, in any case, she was hidden now behind the stout stolidity of Grace.He looked around at the other faces beneath him and saw them settle themselves into their customary expressions of torpor, vacuity and expectation.Very little expectation! They knew well enough, by this time, the kind of thing to expect from him, the turn of phrase, the rise and fall of the voice, the pause dramatic, the whisper expostulatory, the thrust imperative, the smile seductive.
He had often been told, as a curate, that he was a wonderful preacher.His round jolly face, his beaming smile, a certain dramatic gift, had helped him."He is so human," he had heard people say.For many years he had lived on that phrase.For the first time in his life, this morning he distrusted his gift.He was out of touch with them all--because they were dead, killed by forms and repetitions and monotony."We're all dead, you know, and I'm dead too.Let's close the doors and seal this church up.Our day is over." He said of course nothing of the kind.His sermon was stupid, halting and ineffective.
"Naturally," as Colonel Rideout said over his port at lunch, "when a feller's wife's uncle has just hung himself in public, so to speak, it does take the wind out of you.He usen't to preach badly once.
Got stale.They all do."
As Paul dismissed the congregation with the Blessing he felt that everything was over.He was more completely miserable than he had ever been.He had in fact never before been really miserable except when he had the toothache.And now, also, the custom of years made it impossible for him to be miserable for long.He had had no real talk with Maggie since the inquest.Maggie came into his study that afternoon.Their conversation was very quiet and undemonstrative; it happened to be one of the most important conversations in both their lives, and, often afterwards, Paul looked back to it, trying to retrace in it the sentences and movements with which it had been built up.He could never recover anything very much.He could see Maggie sitting in a way that she had on the edge of her chair, looking at him and looking also far beyond him.He knew afterwards that this was the last moment in his life that he had any contact with her.Like a witch, like a ghost, she had come into his life;like a witch, like a ghost, she went out of it, leaving him, for the remainder of his days, a haunted man.