“Ah, it worried me,” declared the assistant, with characteristic frankness, “to see how deep ye were getting in with him.”

Hodder did not reply to this.  He had himself risen, and stood looking at McCrae, filled with a new thought.

“There is one thing I should like to say to you—­which is very difficult, McCrae, but I have no doubt you see the matter as clearly as I do.  In making this fight, I have no one but myself to consider.  I am a single man—­”

“Yell not need to go on,” answered McCrae, with an odd mixture of sternness and gentleness in his voice.  “I’ll stand and fall with ye, Mr. Hodder.  Before I ever thought of the Church I learned a trade, as a boy in Scotland.  I’m not a bad carpenter.  And if worse comes to worse, I’ve an idea I can make as much with my hands as I make in the ministry.”

The smile they exchanged across the table sealed the compact between them.

II

The electric car which carried him to his appointment with the financier shot westward like a meteor through the night.  And now that the hour was actually at hand, it seemed to Hodder that he was absurdly unprepared to meet it.  New and formidable aspects, hitherto unthought of, rose in his mind, and the figure of Eldon Parr loomed to Brobdingnagian proportions as he approached it.  In spite of his determination, the life-blood of his confidence ebbed, a sense of the power and might of the man who had now become his adversary increased; and that apprehension of the impact of the great banker’s personality, the cutting edge with the vast achievements wedged in behind it, each adding weight and impetus to its momentum the apprehension he had felt in less degree on the day of the first meeting, and which had almost immediately evaporated—­surged up in him now.  His fear was lest the charged atmosphere of the banker’s presence might deflect his own hitherto clear perception of true worth.  He dreaded, once in the midst of those disturbing currents, a bungling presentation of the cause which inspired him, and which he knew to be righteousness itself.

Suddenly his mood shifted, betraying still another weakness, and he saw Eldon Parr, suddenly, vividly—­more vividly, indeed, than ever before—­in the shades of the hell of his loneliness.  And pity welled up, drowning the image of incarnate greed and selfishness and lust for wealth and power:  The unique pathos of his former relationship with the man reasserted itself, and Hodder was conscious once more of the dependence which Eldon Parr had had on his friendship.  During that friendship he, Hodder, had never lost the sense of being the stronger of the two, of being leaned upon:  leaned upon by a man whom the world feared and hated, and whom he had been enable to regard with anything but compassion and the unquestionable affection which sprang from it.  Appalled by this transition, he alighted from the car, and stood for a moment alone in the darkness gazing at the great white houses that rose above the dusky outline of shrubbery and trees.