he Consolidated
Tractions Company had made the voyage for which she had been constructed,
and thus had fulfilled her usefulness; and the cleverest of the rats who
had mistaken her for a permanent home scurried ashore before she was
broken up.

All of which is merely in the nature of a commentary on Mr. Langmaid's
genius. His reputation for judgment--which by some is deemed the highest
of human qualities--was impaired; and a man who in his time had selected
presidents of banks and trust companies could certainly be trusted to
choose a parson--particularly if the chief requirements were not of a
spiritual nature. . .

A week later he boarded an east-bound limited train, armed with plenary
powers.

His destination was the hill town where he had spent the first fifteen
years of his life, amid the most striking of New England landscapes, and
the sight of the steep yet delicately pastoral slopes never failed to
thrill him as the train toiled up the wide valley to Bremerton. The
vision of these had remained with him during the years of his toil in the
growing Western city, and embodied from the first homesick days an ideal
to which he hoped sometime permanently to return. But he never had. His
family had shown a perversity of taste in preferring the sea, and he had
perforce been content with a visit of a month or so every other summer,
accompanied usually by his daughter, Helen. On such occasions, he stayed
with his sister, Mrs. Whitely.

The Whitely mills were significant of the new Bremerton, now neither
village nor city, but partaking of the characteristics of both. French
Canadian might be heard on the main square as well as Yankee; and that
revolutionary vehicle, the automobile, had inspired there a great brick
edifice with a banner called the Bremerton House. Enterprising Italians
had monopolized the corners with fruit stores, and plate glass and
asphalt were in evidence. But the hills looked down unchanged, and in
the cool, maple-shaded streets, though dotted with modern residences,
were the same demure colonial houses he had known in boyhood.

He was met at the station by his sister, a large, matronly woman who
invariably set the world whizzing backward for Langmaid; so completely
did she typify the contentment, the point of view of an age gone by. For
life presented no more complicated problems to the middle-aged Mrs.
Whitely than it had to Alice Langmaid.

"I know what you've come for, Nelson," she said reproa