s, pamphlets, statistics; spent hours with the great
child-specialist, Dr. Jarvis, and with certain clergymen who believed
in institutionalism as the hope of the future.

But McCrae was provokingly non-committal.

"Oh, they may try it," he assented somewhat grudgingly, one day when the
rector had laid out for his inspection the architects' sketch for the
settlement house. "No doubt it will help many poor bodies along."

"Is there anything else?" the rector asked, looking searchingly at his
assistant.

"It may as well be that," replied McCrae.

The suspicion began to dawn on Hodder that the Scotch man's ideals were
as high as his own. Both of them, secretly, regarded the new scheme as a
compromise, a yielding to the inevitable . . . .

Mr. Ferguson's remark that an enlarged parish house and a new settlement
house might help to keep some of the young women employed in his
department store out of the dance-halls interested Hodder, who conceived
the idea of a dance-hall of their own. For the rector, in the course of
his bachelor shopping, often resorted to the emporium of his vestryman,
to stand on the stairway which carried him upward without lifting his
feet, to roam, fascinated, through the mazes of its aisles, where he
invariably got lost, and was rescued by suave floor-walkers or pert young
women in black gowns and white collars and cuffs. But they were not all
pert--there were many characters, many types. And he often wondered
whether they did not get tired standing on their feet all day long,
hesitating to ask them; speculated on their lives--flung as most of them
were on a heedless city, and left to shift for themselves. Why was it
that the Church which cared for Mr. Ferguson's soul was unable to get
in touch with, or make an appeal to, those of his thousand employees?

It might indeed have been said that Francis Ferguson cared for his own
soul, as he cared for the rest of his property, and kept it carefully
insured,--somewhat, perhaps, on the principle of Pascal's wager. That
he had been a benefactor to his city no one would deny who had seen the
facade that covered a whole block in the business district from Tower to
Vine, surmounted by a red standard with the familiar motto, "When in
doubt, go to Ferguson's." At Ferguson's you could buy anything from a
pen-wiper to a piano or a Paris gown; sit in a cool restaurant in summer
or in a palm garden in winter; leave your baby--if you had one--in charge
of the mo