rden at the back of the house. The stalks of late flowers lay
withering, but here and there the leaves were still vivid, and clusters
of crimson berries gleamed in the autumn sunshine. A pergola ran down
the middle, and through denuded grape-vines he caught a glimpse, at the
far end, of sculptured figures and curving marble benches surrounding a
pool.

"What a wonderful spot!" he exclaimed.

"My daughter Alison designed it."

"She must have great talent," said the rector.

"She's gone to New York and become a landscape architect," said his
host with a perceptible dryness. "Women in these days are apt to be
everything except what the Lord intended them to be."

They went downstairs, and Hodder took his leave, although he felt an odd
reluctance to go. Mr. Parr rang the bell.

"I'll send you down in the motor," he said.

"I'd like the exercise of walking," said the rector. "I begin to miss it
already, in the city."

"You look as if you had taken a great deal of it," Mr. Parr declared,
following him to the door. "I hope you'll drop in often. Even if I'm not
here, the gallery and the library are at your disposal."

Their eyes met.

"You're very good," Hodder replied, and went down the steps and through
the open doorway.

Lost in reflection, he walked eastward with long and rapid strides,
striving to reduce to order in his mind the impressions the visit
had given him, only to find them too complex, too complicated by
unlooked-for emotions. Before its occurrence, he had, in spite of an
inherent common sense, felt a little uneasiness over the prospective
meeting with the financier. And Nelson Langmaid had hinted,
good-naturedly, that it was his, Hodder's, business, to get on good
terms with Mr. Parr--otherwise the rectorship of St. John's might not
prove abed of roses. Although the lawyer had spoken with delicacy, he
had once more misjudged his man--the result being to put Hodder on his
guard. He had been the more determined not to cater to the banker.

The outcome of it all had been that the rector left him with a sense of
having crossed barriers forbidden to other men, and not understanding
how he had crossed them. Whether this incipient intimacy were ominous
or propitious, whether there were involved in it a germ (engendered by
a radical difference of temperament) capable of developing into future
conflict, he could not now decide. If Eldon Parr were Procrustes
he, Hodder, had fitted the bed, and to say the le