these
things. You know I'm not given to sentimentality, but I was never so
impressed by the growth in any personality as I was this morning by his.
He seems to have become himself, as I always imagined him. And, Phil, he
was so fine! He's absolutely incapable of posing, as you'll admit, and
he stood right up and acknowledged that he'd been wrong in our argument.
He hasn't had the services all summer, and when he resumes them next
Sunday I gathered that he intends to make his new position clear."

Mr. Goodrich thrust his hands in his pockets and gave a low whistle.

"I guess I won't go shooting Saturday, after all," he declared.
"I wouldn't miss Hodder's sermon for all the quail in Harrington County."

"It's high time you did go to church," remarked Eleanor, contemplating,
not without pride, her husband's close-cropped, pugnacious head.

Your judgments are pretty sound, Nell. I'll do you that credit. And
I've always owned up that Hodder would be a fighter if he ever got
started. It's written all over him. What's more, I've a notion that
some of our friends are already a little suspicious of him."

"You mean Mr. Parr?" she asked, anxiously.

"No, Wallis Plimpton."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, with disdain in her voice.

"Mr. Parr only got back yesterday, and Wallis told me that Hodder had
refused to go on a yachting trip with him. Not only foolishness, but
high treason." Phil smiled. "Plimpton's the weather-vane, the barometer
of that crowd--he feels a disturbance long before it turns up--he's as
sensitive as the stock market."

"He is the stock market," said Eleanor.

"It's been my opinion," Phil went on reflectively, "that they've all had
just a trace of uneasiness about Hodder all along, an idea that Nelson
Langmaid slipped up for the first time in his life when he got him to
come. Oh, the feeling's been dormant, but it existed. And they've been
just a little afraid that they couldn't handle him if the time ever came.
He's not their type. When I saw Plimpton at the Country Club the other
day he wondered, in that genial, off-hand manner of his, whether Hodder
would continue to be satisfied with St. John's. Plimpton said he might
be offered a missionary diocese. Oh we'll have a fine old row."

"I believe," said Eleanor, "that that's the only thing that interests
you."

"Well, it does please me," he admitted, when I think of Gordon Atterbury
and Everett Constable and a few others,--Eldon Parr,--who believe that
re