“I was afraid you’d work too hard,” said Mrs. Whitely, in her motherly way.  “I warned you against it, Mr. Hodder.  You never spared yourself, but in a big city parish it’s different.  But you’ve made such a success, Nelson tells me, and everybody likes you there.  I knew they would, of course.  That is our only comfort in losing you, that you have gone to the greater work.  But we do miss you.”

II

The air of Bremerton, and later the air of Bar Harbor had a certain reviving effect.  And John Hodder, although he might be cast down, had never once entertained the notion of surrender.  He was inclined to attribute the depression through which he had passed, the disappointment he had undergone as a just punishment for an overabundance of ego,—­only Hodder used the theological term for the same sin.  Had he not, after all, laboured largely for his own glory, and not Gods?  Had he ever forgotten himself?  Had the idea ever been far from his thoughts that it was he, John Hodder, who would build up the parish of St. John’s into a living organization of faith and works?  The curious thing was that he had the power, and save in moments of weariness he felt it in him.  He must try to remember always that this power was from God.  But why had he been unable to apply it?

And there remained disturbingly in his memory certain phrases of Mrs. Constable’s, such as “elements of growth.”

He would change, she had said; and he had appeared to her as one with depths.  Unsuspected depths—­pockets that held the steam, which was increasing in pressure.  At Bremerton, it had not gathered in the pockets, he had used it all—­all had counted; but in the feverish, ceaseless activity of the city parish he had never once felt that intense satisfaction of emptying himself, nor, the sweet weariness that follows it.  His seemed the weariness of futility.  And introspection was revealing a crack—­after so many years—­in that self that he had believed to be so strongly welded.  Such was the strain of the pent-up force.  He recognized the danger-signal.  The same phenomenon had driven him into the Church, where the steam had found an outlet—­until now.  And yet, so far as his examination went, he had not lost his beliefs, but the power of communicating them to others.

Bremerton, and the sight of another carrying on the work in which he had been happy, weighed upon him, and Bar Harbor offered distraction.  Mrs. Larrabbee had not hesitated to remind him of his promise to visit her.  If the gallery of portraits of the congregation of St. John’s were to be painted, this lady’s, at the age of thirty, would not be the least interesting.  It would have been out of place in no ancestral hall, and many of her friends were surprised, after her husband’s death, that she did not choose one wherein to hang it.  She might have.  For she was the quintessence of that feminine product of our country at which Europe has never ceased to wonder,