“I will be frank with you.  My son’s death has led me, perhaps weakly, to make one more appeal.  You have ruined your career by these chimerical, socialistic notions you have taken up, and which you mistake for Christianity.  As a practical man I can tell you, positively, that St. John’s will run downhill until you are bankrupt.  The people who come to you now are in search of a new sensation, and when that grows stale they will fall away.  Even if a respectable number remain in your congregation, after this excitement and publicity have died down, I have reason to know that it is impossible to support a large city church on contributions.  It has been tried again and again, and failed.  You have borrowed money for the Church’s present needs.  When that is gone I predict that you will find it difficult to get more.”

This had every indication of being a threat, but Hodder, out of sheer curiosity, did not interrupt.  And it was evident that the banker drew a wrong conclusion from his silence, which he may actually have taken for reluctant acquiescence.  His tone grew more assertive.

“The Church, Mr. Hodder, cannot do without the substantial business men.  I have told the bishop so, but he is failing so rapidly from old age that I might as well not have wasted my breath.  He needs an assistant, a suffragan or coadjutor, and I intend to make it my affair to see that he gets one.  When I remember him as he was ten years ago, I find it hard to believe that he is touched with these fancies.  To be charitable, it is senile decay.  He seems to forget what I have done for him, personally, made up his salary, paid his expenses at different times, and no appeal for the diocese to me was ever in vain.  But again, I will let that go.

“What I am getting at is this.  You have made a mess of the affairs of St. John’s, you have made a mess of your life.  I am willing to give you the credit for sincerity.  Some of my friends might not be.  You want to marry my daughter, and she is apparently determined to marry you.  If you are sensible and resign from St. John’s now I will settle on Alison a sufficient sum to allow you both to live in comfort and decency the rest of your lives.  I will not have it said of me that I permitted my daughter to become destitute.”

After he had finished, the rector sat for so long a time that the banker nervously shifted in his chair.  The clergyman’s look had a cumulative quality, an intensity which seemed to increase as the silence continued.  There was no anger in it, no fanaticism.  On the contrary, the higher sanity of it was disturbing; and its extraordinary implication—­gradually borne in upon Eldon Parr—­was that he himself were not in his right mind.  The words, when they came, were a confirmation of this inference.

“It is what I feared, Mr. Parr,” he said.  “You are as yet incapable of comprehending.”

“What do you mean?” asked the banker, jerking his hand from the table.