from Horace to Dante and Gibbon. And when
Hodder got up to fetch this or that edition, he seemed to tower over the
lawyer, who was a big man himself.

Then they discussed business, Langmaid describing the parish, the people,
the peculiar situation in St. John's caused by Dr. Gilman's death, while
Hodder listened. He was not talkative; he made no promises; his reserve
on occasions was even a little disconcerting; and it appealed to the
lawyer from Hodder as a man, but somehow not as a clergyman. Nor did
the rector volunteer any evidences of the soundness of his theological
or political principles.

He gave Langmaid the impression--though without apparent egotism--that
by accepting the call he would be conferring a favour on St. John's; and
this was when he spoke with real feeling of the ties that bound him to
Bremerton. Langmaid felt a certain deprecation of the fact that he was
not a communicant.

For the rest, if Mr. Hodder were disposed to take himself and his
profession seriously, he was by no means lacking in an appreciation of
Langmaid s humour . . . .

The tempering of the lawyer's elation as he returned homeward to report
to Mr. Parr and the vestry may be best expressed by his own exclamation,
which he made to himself:

"I wonder what that fellow would do if he ever got started!" A parson
was, after all, a parson, and he had done his best.

IV

A high, oozing note of the brakes, and the heavy train came to a stop.
Hodder looked out of the window of the sleeper to read the sign 'Marcion'
against the yellow brick of the station set down in the prairie mud, and
flanked by a long row of dun-colored freight cars backed up to a factory.

The factory was flimsy, somewhat resembling a vast greenhouse with its
multitudinous windows, and bore the name of a firm whose offices were in
the city to which he was bound.

"We 'most in now, sah," the negro porter volunteered. "You kin see the
smoke yondah."

Hodder's mood found a figure in this portentous sign whereby the city's
presence was betrayed to travellers from afar,--the huge pall seemed an
emblem of the weight of the city's sorrows; or again, a cloud of her own
making which shut her in from the sight of heaven. Absorbed in the mad
contest for life, for money and pleasure and power she felt no need to
lift her eyes beyond the level of her material endeavours.

He, John Hodder, was to live under that cloud, to labour under it. The
mission on which he w