, through
which the heavy tapestries and shadowy corners of the huge apartment may
be dimly made out. In the center, the soft red glow of the candles, the
gleaming silver, the shining cloth, the Church on one side--and what on
the other? No name given it now, no royal name, but still Power. The
two are still in apposition, not yet in opposition, but the discerning
may perchance read a prophecy in the salient features of the priest.

The Man of Power of the beginning of the twentieth century demands
a subtler analysis, presents an enigma to which the immortal portraits
of forgotten Medicis and Capets give no clew. Imagine, if you can,
a Lorenzo or a Grand Louis in a tightly-buttoned frock coat! There must
be some logical connection between the habit and the age, since crimson
velvet and gold brocade would have made Eldon Parr merely ridiculous.

He is by no means ridiculous, yet take him out of the setting and put him
in the street, and you might pass him a dozen times without noticing him.
Nature, and perhaps unconscious art, have provided him with a protective
exterior; he is the colour of his jungle. After he has crippled you
--if you survive--you will never forget him. You will remember his eye,
which can be unsheathed like a rapier; you will recall his lips as the
expression of a relentless negative. The significance of the slight
bridge on the narrow nose is less easy to define. He is neither tall
nor short; his face is clean-shaven, save for scanty, unobtrusive
reddish tufts high on the cheeks; his hair is thin.

It must be borne in mind, however, that our rector did not see him in his
jungle, and perhaps in the traditional nobility of the lion there is a
certain truth. An interesting biography of some of the powerful of this
earth might be written from the point of view of the confessor or the
physician, who find something to love, something to pity, and nothing to
fear--thus reversing the sentiments of the public.

Yet the friendship between John Hodder and Eldon Parr defied any definite
analysis on the rector's part, and was perhaps the strangest--and most
disquieting element that had as yet come into Hodder's life. The nature
of his intimacy with the banker, if intimacy it might be called, might
have surprised his other parishioners if they could have been hidden
spectators of one of these dinners. There were long silences when the
medium of communication, tenuous at best, seemed to snap, and the two sat
ga