“I came to hear you last Sunday, Mr. Hodder,” the young man volunteered, with that mixture of awkwardness and straightforwardness which often characterize his sex and age in referring to such matters.  “And I had an idea of writing you, too, to tell you how much I liked what you said.  But I know you must have had many letters.  You’ve made me think.”

He flushed, but met the rector’s eye.  Nan stood regarding him with pride.

“You’ve made me think, too,” she added.  “And we intend to pitch in and help you, if we can be of any use.”

He parted from them, wondering.  And it was not until he had reached the parish house that it occurred to him that he was as yet unenlightened as to the young man’s name . . . .

His second reflection brought back to his mind Kate Mercy, for it was with a portion of Nan Ferguson’s generous check that her board had been paid.  And he recalled the girl’s hope, as she had given it to him, that he would find some one in Dalton Street to help . . . .

II

There might, to the mundane eye, have been an element of the ridiculous in the spectacle of the rector of St. John’s counting his gains, since he had chosen—­with every indication of insanity—­to bring the pillars of his career crashing down on his own head.  By no means the least, however, of the treasures flung into his lap was the tie which now bound him to the Philip Goodriches, which otherwise would never have been possible.  And as he made his way thither on this particular evening, a renewed sense came upon him of his emancipation from the dreary, useless hours he had been wont to spend at other dinner tables.  That existence appeared to him now as the glittering, feverish unreality of a nightmare filled with restless women and tired men who drank champagne, thus gradually achieving—­by the time cigars were reached—­an artificial vivacity.  The caprice and superficiality of the one sex, the inability to dwell upon or even penetrate a serious subject, the blindness to what was going on around them; the materialism, the money standard of both, were nauseating in the retrospect.

How, indeed, had life once appeared so distorted to him, a professed servant of humanity, as to lead him in the name of duty into that galley?

Such was the burden of his thought when the homelike front of the Goodrich house greeted him in the darkness, its enshrouded windows gleaming with friendly light.  As the door opened, the merry sound of children’s laughter floated down the stairs, and it seemed to Hodder as though a curse had been lifted. . . .  The lintel of this house had been marked for salvation, the scourge had passed it by:  the scourge of social striving which lay like a blight on a free people.

Within, the note of gentility, of that instinctive good taste to which many greater mansions aspired in vain, was sustained.  The furniture, the pictures, the walls and carpets were true expressions of the individuality of master and mistress, of the unity of the life lived together; and the rector smiled as he detected, in a corner of the hall, a sturdy but diminutive hobby-horse—­here the final, harmonious touch.  There was the sound of a scuffle, treble shrieks of ecstasy from above, and Eleanor Goodrich came out to welcome him.