“Aren’t you yourself suggesting,” said Mr. Bentley, “the course which will permit you to remain?”

Hodder was silent.  The thought struck him with tremendous force.  Had he suggested it?  And how—­why?  Could it be done?  Could he do it or begin it?

“We have met at last in a singular way,” he heard Mr. Bentley going on, “in a way that has brushed aside the conventions, in a way—­I am happy to say—­that has enabled you to give me your confidence.  And I am an old man,—­that has made it easier.  I saw this afternoon, Mr. Hodder, that you were troubled, although you tried to hide it.”

“I knew that you saw it,” Hodder said.

“Nor was it difficult for me to guess something of the cause of it.  The same thing has troubled me.”

“You?”

“Yes,” Mr. Bentley answered.  “I left St. John’s, but the habits and affections of a lifetime are not easily severed.  And some time before I left it I began to have visions of a future for it.  There was a question, many years ago, as to whether a new St. John’s should not be built in the West End, on a site convenient to the parishioners, and this removal I opposed.  Mr. Waring stood by me.  We foresaw the day when this district would be—­what it is now—­the precarious refuge of the unfortunate in the battle of life, of just such unhappy families as the Garvins, of miserable women who sell themselves to keep alive.  I thought of St. John’s, as you did, as an oasis in a desert of misery and vice.  At that time I, too, believed in the system of charities which you have so well characterized as pauperizing.”

“And now?”

Mr. Bentley smiled, as at a reminiscence.

“My eyes were opened,” he replied, and in these simple words summed up and condemned it all.  “They are craving bread, and we fling them atones.  I came here.  It was a house I owned, which I saved from the wrecks, and as I look back upon what the world would call a misfortune, sir, I can see that it was a propitious event, for me.  The street ‘ran down,’ as the saying goes.  I grew gradually to know these people, my new neighbours, largely through their children, and I perceived many things I had not dreamed of—­before then.  I saw how the Church was hampered, fettered; I saw why they disliked and distrusted it.”

“And yet you still believed that it had a mission?” Hodder interrupted.  He had been listening with rapt attention.

“I still believed it,” said Mr. Bentley.  “My conception of that mission changed, grew, and yet it seemed further and further from fulfilment.  And then you came to St. John’s.”

“I!” The cry was involuntary.

“You,” Mr. Bentley repeated.  “Sometimes,” he added whimsically, “I go there, as I have told you.  I saw you, I heard you preach.  I talked to my friend Waring about you.  I saw that your eyes were not opened, but I think I had a certain presentiment, for which I do not pretend to account, that they would be opened.”