The first step was the winning of Browett—­old Cyrus Browett, whose villa, in the fashion of an English manor-house, was a feature of remark even to the Edom summer dwellers—­a villa whose wide grounds were so swept, garnished, trimly flowered, hedge-bordered and shrub-upholstered that, to old Edom, they were like stately parlours built foolishly out of doors.

Months had the rector of tiny St. Anne’s waited for Browett to come to him, knowing that Browett must come in the end.  One less instinctively wise would have made the mistake of going to Browett.  Not this one, whose good spirit warned him that his puissance lay rather with groups of men than with individuals.  From back of the chancel railing he could sway the crowd and make it all his own; whereas, taking that same crowd singly, and beyond his sacerdotal functions, he might be at the mercy of each man composing it.  He knew, in short, that Cyrus Browett as one of his congregation on a Sabbath morning would be a mere atom in the plastic cosmos below him; whereas Browett by himself, with the granite hardness of his crag-like face, his cool little green eyes—­unemotional as two algebraic x’s—­would be a matter fearfully different.  Even his white moustache, close-clipped as his own hedges, and guarding a stiff, chilled mouth, was a thing grimly repressed, telling that the man was quite invulnerable to his own vanity.  A human Browett would have permitted that moustache to mitigate its surroundings with some flowing grace.  He was, indeed, no adversary to meet alone in the open field—­for one who could make him in a crowd a mere string of many to his harp.

The morning so long awaited came on a second Sunday after Trinity.  Cyrus Browett, in whose keeping was the very ark of the money covenant, alighted from his coupe under the porte-cochere of candied Gothic and humbly took seat in his pew like a mere worshipper of God.

As such—­a man among men—­the young rector looked calmly down upon him, letting him sink into the crowd-entity which always became subject to him.

His rare, vibrant tones—­tones that somehow carried the subdued light and warmth of stained glass—­rolled out in moving volume: 

“The Lord is in his holy temple:  let all the earth keep silence before him.”

Then, still as a mere worshipper of God, that Prince of the power of Mammon down in front knelt humbly to say after the young rector above him that he had erred and strayed like a lost sheep, followed too much the devices of his own heart, leaving undone those things he ought to have done, and doing those things which he ought not to have done; that there was no health in him; yet praying that he might, thereafter, lead a godly, righteous and sober life to the glory of God’s holy name.  Even to Allan there was something affecting in this—­a sort of sardonic absurdity in Browett’s actually speaking thus.