t came to Hodder as the completing touch of the revelation he had half
glimpsed by the bedside.

"Ah," he could not help exclaiming, "that explains much."

She had looked at him again, through sudden tears, as though divining his
reference to Mr. Bentley's grief, when a step make them turn. Eldon Parr
had entered the room. Never, not even in that last interview, had his
hardness seemed so concretely apparent as now. Again, pity seemed never
more out of place, yet pity was Hodder's dominant feeling as he met the
coldness, the relentlessness of the glance. The thing that struck him,
that momentarily kept closed his lips, was the awful, unconscious
timeliness of the man's entrance, and his unpreparedness to meet
the blow that was to crush him.

"May I ask, Mr. Hodder," he said, in an unemotional voice, "what you are
doing in this house?"

Still Hodder hesitated, an unwilling executioner.

"Father," said Alison, "Mr. Hodder has come with a message."

Never, perhaps, had Eldon Parr given such complete proof of his lack of
spiritual intuition. The atmosphere, charged with presage for him, gave
him nothing.

"Mr. Hodder takes a strange way of delivering it," was his comment.

Mercy took precedence over her natural directness. She laid her hand
gently on his arm. And she had, at that instant, no thought of the long
years he had neglected her for her brother.

"It's about--Preston," she said.

"Preston!" The name came sharply from Eldon Parr's lips. "What about
him? Speak, can't you?"

"He died this evening," said Alison, simply.

Hodder plainly heard the ticking of the clock on the mantel . . . .
And the drama that occurred was the more horrible because it was hidden;
played, as it were, behind closed doors. For the spectators, there was
only the black wall, and the silence. Eldon Parr literally did nothing,
--made no gesture, uttered no cry. The death, they knew, was taking place
in his soul, yet the man stood before them, naturally, for what seemed an
interminable time . . . .

"Where is he?" he asked.

"At Mr. Bentley's, in Dalton Street." It was Alison who replied again.

Even then he gave no sign that he read retribution in the coincidence,
betrayed no agitation at the mention of a name which, in such a
connection, might well have struck the terror of judgment into his heart.
They watched him while, with a firm step, he crossed the room and pressed
a button in the wall, and waited.

"I want the closed a