“That’s Ferguson’s house,” volunteered Mr. Parr, indicating a marble edifice with countless windows.  “He’s one of your vestrymen, you know.  Ferguson’s Department Store.”  The banker’s eyes twinkled a little for the first time.  “You’ll probably find it convenient.  Most people do.  Clever business man, Ferguson.”

But the rector was finding difficulty in tabulating his impressions.

They turned in between two posts of a gateway toward a huge house of rough granite.  And Hodder wondered whether, in the swift onward roll of things, the time would come when this, too, would have been deemed ephemeral.  With its massive walls and heavy, red-tiled roof that sloped steeply to many points, it seemed firmly planted for ages to come.  It was surrounded, yet not hemmed in, by trees of a considerable age.  His host explained that these had belonged to the original farm of which all this Park Street property had made a part.

They alighted under a porte-cochere with a glass roof.

“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Parr, as the doors swung open and he led the way into the house, “I’m sorry I can’t give you a more cheerful welcome, but my son and daughter, for their own reasons, see fit to live elsewhere.”

Hodder’s quick ear detected in the tone another cadence, and he glanced at Eldon Parr with a new interest . . . .

Presently they stood, face to face, across a table reduced to its smallest proportions, in the tempered light of a vast dining-room, an apartment that seemed to symbolize the fortress-like properties of wealth.  The odd thought struck the clergyman that this man had made his own Tower of London, had built with his own hands the prison in which he was to end his days.  The carved oaken ceiling, lofty though it was, had the effect of pressing downward, the heavy furniture matched the heavy walls, and even the silent, quick-moving servants had a watchful air.

Mr. Parr bowed his head while Hodder asked grace.  They sat down.

The constraint which had characterized their conversation continued, yet there was a subtle change in the attitude of the clergyman.  The financier felt this, though it could not be said that Hodder appeared more at his ease:  his previous silences had been by no means awkward.  Eldon Parr liked self-contained men.  But his perceptions were as keen as Nelson Langmaid’s, and like Langmaid, he had gradually become conscious of a certain baffling personality in the new rector of St. John’s.  From time to time he was aware of the grey-green eyes curiously fixed on him, and at a loss to account for their expression.  He had no thought of reading in it an element of pity.  Yet pity was nevertheless in the rector’s heart, and its advent was emancipating him from the limitations of provincial inexperience.

Suddenly, the financier launched forth on a series of shrewd and searching questions about Bremerton, its church, its people, its industries, and social conditions.  All of which Hodder answered to his apparent satisfaction.