“How good of you to come, Mr. Hodder, when you were so busy,” she said, taking his hand as she seated herself behind the tea-kettle.  “I wanted the chance to talk to you, and it seemed the best way.  What is that you have, Soter’s book?”

“I pinked it up on the table,” he explained.

“Then you haven’t read it?  You ought to.  As a clergyman, it would interest you.  Religion treated from the economic side, you know, the effect of lack of nutrition on character.  Very unorthodox, of course.”

“I find that I have very little time to read,” he said.  “I sometimes take a book along in the cars.”

“Your profession is not so leisurely as it once was, I often think it such a pity.  But you, too, are paying the penalty of complexity.”  She smiled at him sympathetically.  “How is Mr. Parr?  I haven’t seen him for several weeks.”

“He seemed well when I saw him last,” replied Hodder.

“He’s a wonderful man; the amount of work he accomplishes without apparent effort is stupendous.”  Mrs. Constable cast what seemed a tentative glance at the powerful head, and handed him his tea.  “I wanted to talk to you about Gertrude,” she said.

He looked unenlightened.

“About my daughter, Mrs. Warren.  She lives in New York, you know —­on Long Island.”

Then he had remembered something he had heard.

“Yes,” he said.

“She met you, at the Fergusons’, just for a moment, when she was out here last autumn.  What really nice and simple people the Fergusons are, with all their money!”

“Very nice indeed,” he agreed, puzzled.

“I have been sorry for them in the past,” she went on evenly.  “They had rather a hard time—­perhaps you may have heard.  Nobody appreciated them.  They were entombed, so to speak, in a hideous big house over on the South Side, which fortunately burned down, and then they bought in Park Street, and took a pew in St. John’s.  I suppose the idea of that huge department store was rather difficult to get used to.  But I made up my mind it was nonsense to draw the line at department stores, especially since Mr. Ferguson’s was such a useful and remarkable one, so I went across and called.  Mrs. Ferguson was so grateful, it was almost pathetic.  And she’s a very good friend—­she came here everyday when Genevieve had appendicitis.”

“She’s a good woman,” the rector said.

“And Nan,—­I adore Nan, everybody adores Nan.  She reminds me of one of those exquisite, blue-eyed dolls her father imports.  Now if I were a bachelor, Mr. Hodder—!” Mrs. Constable left the rest to his imagination.

He smiled.

“I’m afraid Miss Ferguson has her own ideas.”  Running through Hodder’s mind, a troubled current, were certain memories connected with Mrs. Warren.  Was she the divorced daughter, or was she not?

“But I was going to speak to you about Gertrude.  She’s had such a hard time, poor dear, my heart has bled for her.”  There was a barely perceptible tremor in Mrs. Constable’s voice.  “All that publicity, and the inevitable suffering connected with it!  And no one can know the misery she went through, she is so sensitive.  But now, at last, she has a chance for happiness—­the real thing has come.”