“Does he bring them here,—­or you?” she asked.

“I—­” he hesitated.  “Mr. Bentley has done this every Saturday afternoon for years,” he said, “I am merely one of them.”

She looked at him quickly.  They had started to follow, in the cool path beneath the forest trees.  Restraint fell upon them, brought about by the memory of the intimacy of their former meeting, further complicated on Hodder’s part by his new attitude toward her father, and his finding her in the company, of all persons, of Mr. Bentley.  Unuttered queries pressed on the minds of both.

“Tell me about Mr. Bentley,” she said.

Hodder hesitated.

“I scarcely know where to begin,” he replied, yet smiling at the characteristic abruptness of her question.  The modulations of her voice revealed again the searching, inquisitive spirit within her, and his responded to the intensity of the interest in Mr. Bentley.

“Begin anywhere.”

“Anywhere?” he repeated, seeking to gain time.

“Yes—­anywhere,” she said impatiently.

“Well, he lives in Dalton Street, if you recall what kind of a place that is” (she nodded), “and he is known from one end of it to the other.”

“I see what he is—­he is the most extraordinary person I have ever known.  Just to talk to him gives one such a queer feeling of—­of dissatisfaction with one’s self, and seeing him once more seems to have half revived in me a whole series of dead memories.  And I have been trying to think, but it is all so tantalizing.  There is some mystery about him,” she insisted.  “He disappeared suddenly, and my mother never mentioned him but once afterward, but other persons have spoken of him since—­I forget who.  He was so well known, and he used to go to St. John’s.”

“Yes, he used to go to St. John’s.”

“What happened to him—­do you know?  The reason he stopped coming to our house was some misunderstanding with my father, of course.  I am positive my mother never changed her feelings toward him.”

“I can only tell you what he has told me, which is all I know —­authoritatively,” Hodder replied.  How could he say to her that her father had ruined Mr. Bentley?  Indeed, with a woman of her fearlessness and honesty—­and above all, her intuition,—­he felt the cruelty of his position keenly.  Hodder did not relish half truths; and he felt that, however scant his intercourse in the future might be with Alison Parr, he would have liked to have kept it on that basis of frankness in which it had begun.  But the exact stage of disillusionment she had reached in regard to Eldon Parr was unknown to him, and he feared that a further revelation might possibly sever the already precarious tie between father and daughter.

He recounted, therefore, that Mr. Bentley had failed; and how he had before that given much of his estate away in charity, how he had been unable to keep his pew in St. John’s, and had retired to the house in Dalton Street.