erley, across from
us."

"I am an old man, Mr. Plimpton," Asa Waring replied. "I do not move as
easily as some other people in these days."

Everett Constable produced his handkerchief and rubbed his nose
violently. But Mr. Plimpton was apparently undaunted.

"I have always said," he observed, "that there was something very fine in
your sticking to that neighbourhood after your friends had gone. Here's
Phil!"

Phil Goodrich looked positively belligerent, and as he took his stand
on the other side of Hodder his father-in-law smiled at him grimly.
Mr. Goodrich took hold of the rector's arm.

"I missed one or two meetings last spring, Mr. Hodder," he said, "but I'm
going to be on hand after this. My father, I believe, never missed a
vestry meeting in his life. Perhaps that was because they used to hold
most of 'em at his house."

"And serve port and cigars, I'm told," Mr. Plimpton put in.

"That was an inducement, Wallis, I'll admit," answered Phil. "But there
are even greater inducements now."

In view of Phil Goodrich's well-known liking for a fight, this was too
pointed to admit of a reply, but Mr. Plimpton was spared the attempt by
the entrance of. Nelson Langmaid. The lawyer, as he greeted them,
seemed to be preoccupied, nor did he seek to relieve the tension with
his customary joke. A few moments of silence followed, when Eldon Parr
was seen to be standing in the doorway, surveying them.

"Good evening, gentlemen," he said coldly, and without more ado went to
his customary chair, and sat down in it. Immediately followed a scraping
of other chairs. There was a dominating quality about the man not to be
gainsaid.

The rector called the meeting to order . . . .

During the routine business none of the little asides occurred which
produce laughter. Every man in the room was aware of the intensity of
Eldon Parr's animosity, and yet he betrayed it neither by voice, look,
or gesture. There was something uncanny in this self-control, this sang
froid with which he was wont to sit at boards waiting unmoved for the
time when he should draw his net about his enemies, and strangle them
without pity. It got on Langmaid's nerves--hardened as he was to it.
He had seen many men in that net; some had struggled, some had taken
their annihilation stoically; honest merchants, freebooters, and
brigands. Most of them had gone out, with their families, into that
precarious border-land of existence in which the to-morrows are e