nd I'll come back in the morning."

He gave it back to her, and as she was folding it his glance fell on a
photograph in the basket.

"I kept it, I don't know why," he heard her say; "I didn't have the
heart to burn it."

He started recovered himself, and rose.

"I'll go to see the agent the first thing to-morrow," he said. "And
then--you'll be ready for me? You trust me?"

"I'd do anything for you," was her tremulous reply.

Her disquieting, submissive smile haunted him as he roped his way down
the stairs to the street, and then the face in the photograph replaced
it--the laughing eyes, the wilful, pleasure--loving mouth he had seen in
the school and college pictures of Preston Parr.

Volume 5.

CHAPTER XVII. RECONSTRUCTION

I

Life had indeed become complicated, paradoxical. He, John Hodder, a
clergyman, rector of St. John's by virtue of not having resigned,
had entered a restaurant of ill repute, had ordered champagne for an
abandoned woman, and had no sense of sin when he awoke the next morning!
The devil, in the language of orthodox theology, had led him there. He
had fallen under the influence of the tempter of his youth, and all in
him save the carnal had been blotted out.

More paradoxes! If the devil had not taken possession of him and led him
there, it were more than probable that he could never have succeeded
in any other way in getting on a footing of friendship with this woman,
Kate Marcy. Her future, to be sure, was problematical. Here was no
simple, sentimental case he might formerly have imagined, of trusting
innocence betrayed, but a mixture of good and evil, selfishness and
unselfishness. And she had, in spite of all, known the love which
effaces self! Could the disintegration, in her case, be arrested?

Gradually Hodder was filled with a feeling which may be called amazement
because, although his brain was no nearer to a solution than before, he
was not despondent. For a month he had not permitted his mind to dwell
on the riddle; yet this morning he felt stirring within him a new energy
for which he could not account, a hope unconnected with any mental
process! He felt in touch, once more, faintly but perceptibly, with
something stable in the chaos. In bygone years he had not seen the
chaos, but the illusion of an orderly world, a continual succession of
sunrises, 'couleur de rose', from the heights above Bremerton. Now were
the scales fallen from his eyes; now he saw the