e
would see Mr. Ferguson, and talk to him....

Then there was Mrs. Constable's short note, that troubled and puzzled
him. This, too, had in it an undercurrent of fear, and the memory came
to him of the harrowing afternoon he had once spent with her, when
she would have seemed to have predicted the very thing which had now
happened to him. And yet not that thing. He divined instinctively that
a maturer thought on the subject of his sermon had brought on an
uneasiness as the full consequences of this new teaching had dawned upon
her consequences which she had not foreseen when she had foretold the
change. And he seemed to read between the lines that the renunciation he
demanded was too great. Would he not let her come and talk to him?...

Miss Brewer, a lady of no inconsiderable property, was among those who
told him plainly that if he remained they would have to give up their
pews. Three or four communications were even more threatening. Mr.
Alpheus Gore, Mrs. Plimpton's brother, who at five and forty had managed
to triple his share of the Gore inheritance, wrote that it would be his
regretful duty to send to the bishop an Information on the subject of
Mr. Hodder's sermon.

There were, indeed, a few letters which he laid, thankfully, in a pile
by themselves. These were mostly from certain humble members of his
parish who had not followed their impulses to go to him after the
service, or from strangers who had chanced to drop into the church. Some
were autobiographical, such as those of a trained nurse, a stenographer,
a hardware clerk who had sat up late Sunday night to summarize what that
sermon had meant to him, how a gray and hopeless existence had taken on
a new colour. Next Sunday he would bring a friend who lived in the same
boarding house.... Hodder read every word of these, and all were in
the same strain: at last they could perceive a meaning to religion, an
application of it to such plodding lives as theirs....

One or two had not understood, but had been stirred, and were coming to
talk to him. Another was filled with a venomous class hatred....

The first intimation he had of the writer of another letter seemed from
the senses rather than the intellect. A warm glow suffused him, mounted
to his temples as he stared at the words, turned over the sheet, and
read at the bottom the not very legible signature. The handwriting, by
no means classic, became then and there indelibly photographed on his
brain, and