hat existence
appeared to him now as the glittering, feverish unreality of a nightmare
filled with restless women and tired men who drank champagne, thus
gradually achieving--by the time cigars were reached--an artificial
vivacity. The caprice and superficiality of the one sex, the inability
to dwell upon or even penetrate a serious subject, the blindness to what
was going on around them; the materialism, the money standard of both,
were nauseating in the retrospect.

How, indeed, had life once appeared so distorted to him, a professed
servant of humanity, as to lead him in the name of duty into that
galley?

Such was the burden of his thought when the homelike front of the
Goodrich house greeted him in the darkness, its enshrouded windows
gleaming with friendly light. As the door opened, the merry sound of
children's laughter floated down the stairs, and it seemed to Hodder
as though a curse had been lifted.... The lintel of this house had
been marked for salvation, the scourge had passed it by: the scourge of
social striving which lay like a blight on a free people.

Within, the note of gentility, of that instinctive good taste to which
many greater mansions aspired in vain, was sustained. The furniture,
the pictures, the walls and carpets were true expressions of the
individuality of master and mistress, of the unity of the life lived
together; and the rector smiled as he detected, in a corner of the hall,
a sturdy but diminutive hobby-horse--here the final, harmonious touch.
There was the sound of a scuffle, treble shrieks of ecstasy from above,
and Eleanor Goodrich came out to welcome him.

"Its Phil," she told him in laughing despair, "he upsets all my
discipline, and gets them so excited they don't go to sleep for
hours..."

Seated in front of the fire in the drawing-room, he found Alison Parr.
Her coolness, her radiancy, her complete acceptance of the situation,
all this and more he felt from the moment he touched her hand and looked
into her face. And never had she so distinctly represented to him the
mysterious essence of fate. Why she should have made the fourth at this
intimate gathering, and whether or not she was or had been an especial
friend of Eleanor Goodrich he did not know. There was no explanation....

A bowl of superb chrysanthemums occupied the centre of the table.
Eleanor lifted them off and placed them on the sideboard.

"I've got used to looking at Phil," she explained, "and craning is