luence and soon or late gravitate toward him in obedience to the same
law that draws the apple to the earth's lap. In this manner had the
young man won his prizes for oratory; so had he won his wife; so had he
won his first pastorate; so now would he win that prize he was conscious
of meriting next--a city parish--a rectorate in the chief seat of his
church in America, where was all wealth and power as well as the great
among men, to be swayed by his eloquence and brought at last to the
Master's feet. And here, again, would his future enlarge to prospects
now but mistily surmised--prospects to be moved upon anon with
triumphant tread. Infinite aspiration opening ever beyond itself--this
was his. Meantime, step by step, with zealous care for the accuracy of
each, with eyes always ahead, leaving nothing undone--he was forever
fashioning the moulds into which the Spirit should materialise his
benefits.

The first step was the winning of Browett--old Cyrus Browett, whose
villa, in the fashion of an English manor-house, was a feature of remark
even to the Edom summer dwellers--a villa whose wide grounds were so
swept, garnished, trimly flowered, hedge-bordered and shrub-upholstered
that, to old Edom, they were like stately parlours built foolishly out
of doors.

Months had the rector of tiny St. Anne's waited for Browett to come to
him, knowing that Browett must come in the end. One less instinctively
wise would have made the mistake of going to Browett. Not this one,
whose good spirit warned him that his puissance lay rather with groups
of men than with individuals. From back of the chancel railing he could
sway the crowd and make it all his own; whereas, taking that same crowd
singly, and beyond his sacerdotal functions, he might be at the mercy of
each man composing it. He knew, in short, that Cyrus Browett as one of
his congregation on a Sabbath morning would be a mere atom in the
plastic cosmos below him; whereas Browett by himself, with the granite
hardness of his crag-like face, his cool little green eyes--unemotional
as two algebraic x's--would be a matter fearfully different. Even his
white moustache, close-clipped as his own hedges, and guarding a stiff,
chilled mouth, was a thing grimly repressed, telling that the man was
quite invulnerable to his own vanity. A human Browett would have
permitted that moustache to mitigate its surroundings with some flowing
grace. He was, indeed, no adversary to meet alone in the