pointed to admit of a reply, but Mr. Plimpton was spared the attempt by
the entrance of. Nelson Langmaid. The lawyer, as he greeted them, seemed
to be preoccupied, nor did he seek to relieve the tension with his
customary joke. A few moments of silence followed, when Eldon Parr was
seen to be standing in the doorway, surveying them.

"Good evening, gentlemen," he said coldly, and without more ado went to
his customary chair, and sat down in it. Immediately followed a scraping
of other chairs. There was a dominating quality about the man not to be
gainsaid.

The rector called the meeting to order....

During the routine business none of the little asides occurred which
produce laughter. Every man in the room was aware of the intensity of
Eldon Parr's animosity, and yet he betrayed it neither by voice, look,
or gesture. There was something uncanny in this self-control, this sang
froid with which he was wont to sit at boards waiting unmoved for the
time when he should draw his net about his enemies, and strangle them
without pity. It got on Langmaid's nerves--hardened as he was to it. He
had seen many men in that net; some had struggled, some had taken their
annihilation stoically; honest merchants, freebooters, and brigands.
Most of them had gone out, with their families, into that precarious
border-land of existence in which the to-morrows are ever dreaded.

Yet here, somehow, was a different case. Langmaid found himself going
back to the days when his mother had taken him to church, and he could
not bear to look at, Hodder. Since six o'clock that afternoon--had his
companions but known it--he had passed through one of the worst periods
of his existence....

After the regular business had been disposed of a brief interval was
allowed, for the sake of decency, to ensue. That Eldon Parr would not
lead the charge in person was a foregone conclusion. Whom, then, would
he put forward? For obvious reasons, not Wallis Plimpton or Langmaid,
nor Francis Ferguson. Hodder found his, glance unconsciously fixed
upon Everett Constable, who, moved nervously and slowly pushed back his
chair. He was called upon, in this hour and in the church his father had
helped to found, to make the supreme payment for the years of financial
prosperity. Although a little man, with his shoulders thrown back and
his head high, he generally looked impressive when he spoke, and his
fine features and clear-cut English contributed to the effect. But n