“I am sorry, but I must,” he told her, and she may not have suspected the extent to which the firmness was feigned.

“You have promised to make other visits?  The Fergusons,—­they said they expected you.”

“I’m going west—­home,” he said, and the word sounded odd.

“At this season!  But there is nobody in church, at least only a few, and Mr. McCrae can take care of those—­he always does.  He likes it.”

Hodder smiled in spite of himself.  He might have told her that those outside the church were troubling him.  But he did not, since he had small confidence in being able to bring them in.

“I have been away too long, I am getting spoiled,” he replied, with an attempt at lightness.  He forced his eyes to meet hers, and she read in them an unalterable resolution.

“It is my opinion you are too conscientious, even for a clergyman,” she said, and now it was her lightness that hurt.  She protested no more.  And as she led the way homeward through the narrow forest path, her head erect, still maintaining this lighter tone, he wondered how deeply she had read him; how far her intuition had carried her below the surface; whether she guessed the presence of that stifled thing in him which was crying feebly for life; whether it was that she had discovered, or something else?  He must give it the chance it craved.  He must get away—­he must think.  To surrender now would mean destruction. . .

Early the next morning, as he left the pier in the motor boat, he saw a pink scarf waving high above him from the loggia.  And he flung up his hand in return.  Mingled with a faint sense of freedom was intense sadness.

CHAPTER VIII

THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE

From the vantage point of his rooms in the parish house, Hodder reviewed the situation.  And despite the desires thronging after him in his flight he had the feeling of once who, in the dark, has been very near to annihilation.  What had shaken him most was the revelation of an old enemy which, watching its chance, had beset him at the first opportunity; and at a time when the scheme of life, which he flattered himself to have solved forever, was threatening once more to resolve itself into fragments.  He had, as if by a miracle, escaped destruction in some insidious form.

He shrank instinctively from an analysis of the woman in regard to whom his feelings were, so complicated, and yet by no means lacking in tenderness.  But as time went on, he recognized more and more that she had come into his life at a moment when he was peculiarly vulnerable.  She had taken him off his guard.  That the brilliant Mrs. Larrabbee should have desired him—­or what she believed was him—­was food enough for thought, was an indication of an idealism in her nature that he would not have suspected.  From a worldly point of view, the marriage would have commended itself to none of her friends.  Yet Hodder