rough denuded grape-vines he caught a glimpse, at the
far end, of sculptured figures and curving marble benches surrounding a
pool.

"What a wonderful spot!" he exclaimed.

"My daughter Alison designed it."

"She must have great talent," said the rector.

"She's gone to New York and become a landscape architect," said his host
with a perceptible dryness. "Women in these days are apt to be
everything except what the Lord intended them to be."

They went downstairs, and Hodder took his leave, although he felt an odd
reluctance to go. Mr. Parr rang the bell.

"I'll send you down in the motor," he said.

"I'd like the exercise of walking," said the rector. "I begin to miss it
already, in the city."

"You look as if you had taken a great deal of it," Mr. Parr declared,
following him to the door. "I hope you'll drop in often. Even if I'm
not here, the gallery and the library are at your disposal."

Their eyes met.

"You're very good," Hodder replied, and went down the steps and through
the open doorway.

Lost in reflection, he walked eastward with long and rapid strides,
striving to reduce to order in his mind the impressions the visit had
given him, only to find them too complex, too complicated by unlooked-for
emotions. Before its occurrence, he had, in spite of an inherent common
sense, felt a little uneasiness over the prospective meeting with the
financier. And Nelson Langmaid had hinted, good-naturedly, that it was
his, Hodder's, business, to get on good terms with Mr. Parr--otherwise
the rectorship of St. John's might not prove abed of roses. Although the
lawyer had spoken with delicacy, he had once more misjudged his man--the
result being to put Hodder on his guard. He had been the more determined
not to cater to the banker.

The outcome of it all had been that the rector left him with a sense of
having crossed barriers forbidden to other men, and not understanding how
he had crossed them. Whether this incipient intimacy were ominous or
propitious, whether there were involved in it a germ (engendered by a
radical difference of temperament) capable of developing into future
conflict, he could not now decide. If Eldon Parr were Procrustes he,
Hodder, had fitted the bed, and to say the least, this was extraordinary,
if not a little disquieting. Now and again his thoughts reverted to the
garden, and to the woman who had made it. Why had she deserted?

At length, after he had been walking for nearly an hour