white, gabled house
which had sheltered stern ancestors, he travelled in the June following
his experience. Standing under the fan-light of the elm-shaded doorway,
she seemed a vision of the peace wherein are mingled joy and sorrow,
faith and tears! A tall, quiet woman, who had learned the lesson
of mothers,--how to wait and how to pray, how to be silent with a
clamouring heart.

She had lived to see him established at Bremerton, to be with him there
awhile....

He awoke from these memories to gaze down through the criss-cross of a
trestle to the twisted, turbid waters of the river far below. Beyond
was the city. The train skirted for a while the hideous, soot-stained
warehouses that faced the water, plunged into a lane between humming
factories and clothes-draped tenements, and at last glided into
semi-darkness under the high, reverberating roof of the Union Station.

CHAPTER III. THE PRIMROSE PATH

I

Nelson Langmaid's extraordinary judgment appeared once more to be
vindicated.

There had been, indeed, a critical, anxious moment, emphasized by the
agitation of bright feminine plumes and the shifting of masculine backs
into the corners of the pews. None got so far as to define to themselves
why there should be an apparent incompatibility between ruggedness and
orthodoxy--but there were some who hoped and more who feared. Luther
had been orthodox once, Savonarola also: in appearance neither was more
canonical than the new rector.

His congregation, for the most part, were not analytical. But they
felt a certain anomaly in virility proclaiming tradition. It took them
several Sundays to get accustomed to it.

To those who had been used for more than a quarter of a century to
seeing old Dr. Gilman's gentle face under the familiar and faded dove of
the sounding-board, to the deliberation of his walk, and the hesitation
of his manner, the first impression of the Reverend John Hodder was
somewhat startling. They felt that there should be a leisurely element
in religion. He moved across the chancel with incredible swiftness, his
white surplice flowing like the draperies of a moving Victory, wasted
no time with the pulpit lights, announced his text in a strong and
penetrating, but by no means unpleasing voice, and began to speak with
the certainty of authority.

Here, in an age when a new rector had, ceased to be an all-absorbing
topic in social life, was a new and somewhat exhilarating experience.
And it m