III

After the service was over the people lingered in the church, standing in the pews and aisles, as though loath to leave.  The woman with the perfume and the elaborate hat was heard to utter a succinct remark.

“Say, Charlie, I guess he’s all right.  I never had it put like that.”

The thick-necked man’s reply was inaudible.

Eleanor Goodrich was silent and a little pale as she pressed close to Alison.  Her imagination had been stretched, as it were, and she was still held in awe by the vastness of what she had heard and seen.  Vaster even than ever,—­so it appeared now,—­demanding greater sacrifices than she had dreamed of.  She looked back upon the old as at receding shores.

Alison, with absorbed fascination, watched the people; encountered, here and there, recognitions from men and women with whom she had once danced and dined in what now seemed a previous existence.  Why had they come? and how had they received the message?  She ran into a little man, a dealer in artists’ supplies who once had sold her paints and brushes, who stared and bowed uncertainly.  She surprised him by taking his hand.

“Did you like it?” she asked, impulsively.

“It’s what I’ve been thinking for years, Miss Parr,” he responded, “thinking and feeling.  But I never knew it was Christianity.  And I never thought—­” he stopped and looked at her, alarmed.

“Oh,” she said, “I believe in it, too—­or try to.”

She left him, mentally gasping . . . .  Without, on the sidewalk, Eleanor Goodrich was engaged in conversation with a stockily built man, inclined to stoutness; he had a brown face and a clipped, bristly mustache.  Alison paused involuntarily, and saw him start and hesitate as his clear, direct gaze met her own.

Bedloe Hubbell was one of those who had once sought to marry her.  She recalled him as an amiable and aimless boy; and after she had gone East she had received with incredulity and then with amusement the news of his venture into altruistic politics.  It was his efficiency she had doubted, not his sincerity.  Later tidings, contemptuous and eventually irritable utterances of her own father, together with accounts in the New York newspapers of his campaign, had convinced her in spite of herself that Bedloe Hubbell had actually shaken the seats of power.  And somehow, as she now took him in, he looked it.

His transformation was one of the signs, one of the mysteries of the times.  The ridicule and abuse of the press, the opposition and enmity of his childhood friends, had developed the man of force she now beheld, and who came forward to greet her.

“Alison!” he exclaimed.  He had changed in one sense, and not in another.  Her colour deepened as the sound of his voice brought back the lapsed memories of the old intimacy.  For she had been kind to him, kinder than to any other; and the news of his marriage—­to a woman from the Pacific coast—­had actually induced in her certain longings and regrets.  When the cards had reached her, New York and the excitement of the life into which she had been weakly, if somewhat unwittingly, drawn had already begun to pall.