e me think, too," she added. "And we intend to pitch in and
help you, if we can be of any use."

He parted from them, wondering. And it was not until he had reached the
parish house that it occurred to him that he was as yet unenlightened as
to the young man's name . . . .

His second reflection brought back to his mind Kate Mercy, for it was
with a portion of Nan Ferguson's generous check that her board had been
paid. And he recalled the girl's hope, as she had given it to him, that
he would find some one in Dalton Street to help . . . .

II

There might, to the mundane eye, have been an element of the ridiculous
in the spectacle of the rector of St. John's counting his gains, since he
had chosen--with every indication of insanity--to bring the pillars of
his career crashing down on his own head. By no means the least,
however, of the treasures flung into his lap was the tie which now bound
him to the Philip Goodriches, which otherwise would never have been
possible. And as he made his way thither on this particular evening, a
renewed sense came upon him of his emancipation from the dreary, useless
hours he had been wont to spend at other dinner tables. That existence
appeared to him now as the glittering, feverish unreality of a nightmare
filled with restless women and tired men who drank champagne, thus
gradually achieving--by the time cigars were reached--an artificial
vivacity. The caprice and superficiality of the one sex, the inability
to dwell upon or even penetrate a serious subject, the blindness to what
was going on around them; the materialism, the money standard of both,
were nauseating in the retrospect.

How, indeed, had life once appeared so distorted to him, a professed
servant of humanity, as to lead him in the name of duty into that galley?

Such was the burden of his thought when the homelike front of the
Goodrich house greeted him in the darkness, its enshrouded windows
gleaming with friendly light. As the door opened, the merry sound of
children's laughter floated down the stairs, and it seemed to Hodder as
though a curse had been lifted. . . . The lintel of this house had
been marked for salvation, the scourge had passed it by: the scourge of
social striving which lay like a blight on a free people.

Within, the note of gentility, of that instinctive good taste to which
many greater mansions aspired in vain, was sustained. The furniture, the
pictures, the walls and carpets were true exp