his
imagination.

He smiled.

"I'm afraid Miss Ferguson has her own ideas." Running through Hodder's
mind, a troubled current, were certain memories connected with Mrs.
Warren. Was she the divorced daughter, or was she not?

"But I was going to speak to you about Gertrude. She's had such a
hard time, poor dear, my heart has bled for her." There was a barely
perceptible tremor in Mrs. Constable's voice. "All that publicity, and
the inevitable suffering connected with it! And no one can know the
misery she went through, she is so sensitive. But now, at last, she has
a chance for happiness--the real thing has come."

"The real thing!" he echoed.

"Yes. She's going to marry a splendid man, Eldridge Sumner. I know the
family well. They have always stood for public spirit, and this Mr.
Summer, although he is little over thirty, was chairman of that Vice
Commission which made such a stir in New York a year ago. He's a lawyer,
with a fine future, and they're madly in love. And Gertrude realizes
now, after her experience, the true values in life. She was only a child
when she married Victor Warren."

"But Mr. Warren," Hodder managed to say, "is still living."

"I sometimes wonder, Mr. Hodder," she went on hurriedly, "whether we can
realize how different the world is today from what it was twenty years
ago, until something of this kind is actually brought home to us.
I shall never forget how distressed, how overwhelmed Mr. Constable and I
were when Gertrude got her divorce. I know that they are regarding such
things differently in the East, but out here!--We never dreamed that such
a thing could happen to us, and we regarded it as a disgrace. But
gradually--" she hesitated, and looked at the motionless clergyman
--"gradually I began to see Gertrude's point of view, to understand that
she had made a mistake, that she had been too young to comprehend what
she was doing. Victor Warren had been ruined by money, he wasn't
faithful to her, but an extraordinary thing has happened in his case.
He's married again, and Gertrude tells me he's absurdly happy, and has
two children."

As he listened, Hodder's dominating feeling was amazement that such a
course as her daughter had taken should be condoned by this middle-aged
lady, a prominent member of his congregation and the wife of a vestryman,
who had been nurtured and steeped in Christianity. And not only that:
Mrs. Constable was plainly defending a further step, which in his op