Our scene might almost be mediaeval with its encircling gloom, through which the heavy tapestries and shadowy corners of the huge apartment may be dimly made out.  In the center, the soft red glow of the candles, the gleaming silver, the shining cloth, the Church on one side—­and what on the other?  No name given it now, no royal name, but still Power.  The two are still in apposition, not yet in opposition, but the discerning may perchance read a prophecy in the salient features of the priest.

The Man of Power of the beginning of the twentieth century demands a subtler analysis, presents an enigma to which the immortal portraits of forgotten Medicis and Capets give no clew.  Imagine, if you can, a Lorenzo or a Grand Louis in a tightly-buttoned frock coat!  There must be some logical connection between the habit and the age, since crimson velvet and gold brocade would have made Eldon Parr merely ridiculous.

He is by no means ridiculous, yet take him out of the setting and put him in the street, and you might pass him a dozen times without noticing him.  Nature, and perhaps unconscious art, have provided him with a protective exterior; he is the colour of his jungle.  After he has crippled you —­if you survive—­you will never forget him.  You will remember his eye, which can be unsheathed like a rapier; you will recall his lips as the expression of a relentless negative.  The significance of the slight bridge on the narrow nose is less easy to define.  He is neither tall nor short; his face is clean-shaven, save for scanty, unobtrusive reddish tufts high on the cheeks; his hair is thin.

It must be borne in mind, however, that our rector did not see him in his jungle, and perhaps in the traditional nobility of the lion there is a certain truth.  An interesting biography of some of the powerful of this earth might be written from the point of view of the confessor or the physician, who find something to love, something to pity, and nothing to fear—­thus reversing the sentiments of the public.

Yet the friendship between John Hodder and Eldon Parr defied any definite analysis on the rector’s part, and was perhaps the strangest—­and most disquieting element that had as yet come into Hodder’s life.  The nature of his intimacy with the banker, if intimacy it might be called, might have surprised his other parishioners if they could have been hidden spectators of one of these dinners.  There were long silences when the medium of communication, tenuous at best, seemed to snap, and the two sat gazing at each other as from mountain peaks across impassable valleys.  With all the will in the world, their souls lost touch, though the sense in the clergyman of the other’s vague yearning for human companionship was never absent.  It was this yearning that attracted Hodder, who found in it a deep pathos.

After one of these intervals of silence, Eldon Parr looked up from his claret.

“I congratulate you, Hodder, on the stand you took in regard to Constable’s daughter,” he said.