A certain popular avenue runs between rows of once splendid mansions now struggling a little awkwardly into trade on their lowest floors, like impoverished but courageous gentlefolk.  To these little tragedies, however, the pedestrian throng is obtuse—­blind to the pathos of those still haughty upper floors, silent and reserved, behind drawn curtains, while the lower two floors are degraded into shops.  In so far as the throng is not busied with itself, its attention is upon the roadway, where is ever passing a festival procession of Success, its floats of Worth Rewarded being the costliest and shiniest of the carriage-maker’s craft—­eloquent of true dignity and fineness even in the swift silence of their rubber tires.  This is a spectacle to be viewed seriously; to be mocked at only by the flippant, though the moving pedestrian mass on the sidewalk is gayer of colour, more sentient—­more companionable, more understandably human.

It was in this weaving mass on the walk that the communicants of St. Antipas were often refreshed by the vision of their rector on pleasant afternoons.  Here the Reverend Doctor Linford loved to walk in God’s sunlight out of sheer simple joy in living—­happily undismayed by any possible consciousness that his progress turned all faces to regard him, as inevitably as one would turn the spokes of an endless succession of turnstyles.

Habited with an obviously loving attention to detail, yet with tasteful restraint, a precise and frankly confessed, yet never obtrusive, elegance, bowing with a manner to those of his flock favoured by heaven to meet him, superbly, masculinely handsome, he was far more than a mere justification of the pride St. Antipas felt in him.  He was a splendid inspiration to belief in God and man.

Nor was he of the type Pharasaic—­the type to profess love for its kind, yet stay scrupulously aloof from the vanquished and court only the victors.  Indeed, this was not so.

In the full tide of his progress—­it was indeed a progress and never a mere walk—­he would stop to address a few words of simple cheer to the aged female mendicant—­perhaps to make a joke with her—­some pleasantry not unbefitting his station, his mien denoting a tender chivalry which has been agreeably subdued though not impaired by the experience inevitable to a man of the world.  When he dropped the coin into the withered palm, he did it with a certain lingering hurriedness, as one frankly unable to repress a human weakness, though nervously striving to have it over quickly and by stealth.

Young Rigby Reeves, generalising, as it later appeared, from inadequate data, swore once that the rector of St. Antipas kept always an eye ahead for the female mendicant in the tattered shawl and the bonnet of inferior modishness; that, if the Avenue was crowded enough to make it seem worth while, he would even cross from one side to the other for the sake of speaking to her publicly.