th thankfulness that there were some who
understood--and that this woman was among them, and her husband . . .
Phil Goodrich took him by the hand.

"I can understand that kind of religion," he said. "And, if necessary,
I can fight for it. I have come to enlist."

"And I can understand it, too," added the sunburned Evelyn. "I hope you
will let me help."

That was all they said, but Hodder understood. Eleanor Goodrich's eyes
were dimmed as she smiled an her sister and her husband--a smile that
bespoke the purest quality of pride. And it was then, as they made way
for others, that the full value of their allegiance was borne in upon
him, and he grasped the fact that the intangible barrier which had
separated him from them had at last been broken down: His look followed
the square shoulders and aggressive, close-cropped head of Phil Goodrich,
the firm, athletic figure of Evelyn, who had represented to him an entire
class of modern young women, vigorous, athletic, with a scorn of cant in
which he secretly sympathized, hitherto frankly untouched by spiritual
interests of any sort. She had, indeed, once bluntly told him that
church meant nothing to her . . . .

In that little company gathered in the choir room were certain members of
his congregation whom, had he taken thought, he would least have expected
to see. There were Mr. and Mrs. Bradley, an elderly couple who had
attended St. John's for thirty years; and others of the same
unpretentious element of his parish who were finding in modern life an
increasingly difficult and bewildering problem. There was little Miss
Tallant, an assiduous guild worker whom he had thought the most orthodox
of persons; Miss Ramsay, who taught the children of the Italian mothers;
Mr. Carton, the organist, a professed free-thinker, with whom Hodder had
had many a futile argument; and Martha Preston, who told him that he had
made her think about religion seriously for the first time in her life.

And there were others, types equally diverse. Young men of the choir,
and others whom he had never seen, who informed him shyly that they would
come again, and bring their friends . . . .

And all the while, in the background, Hodder had been aware of a familiar
face--Horace Bentley's. Beside him, when at length he drew near, was his
friend Asa Waring--a strangely contrasted type. The uncompromising eyes
of a born leader of men flashed from beneath the heavy white eyebrows,
the button of the Legio