“I wonder what that fellow would do if he ever got started!” A parson was, after all, a parson, and he had done his best.

IV

A high, oozing note of the brakes, and the heavy train came to a stop.  Hodder looked out of the window of the sleeper to read the sign ‘Marcion’ against the yellow brick of the station set down in the prairie mud, and flanked by a long row of dun-colored freight cars backed up to a factory.

The factory was flimsy, somewhat resembling a vast greenhouse with its multitudinous windows, and bore the name of a firm whose offices were in the city to which he was bound.

“We ’most in now, sah,” the negro porter volunteered.  “You kin see the smoke yondah.”

Hodder’s mood found a figure in this portentous sign whereby the city’s presence was betrayed to travellers from afar,—­the huge pall seemed an emblem of the weight of the city’s sorrows; or again, a cloud of her own making which shut her in from the sight of heaven.  Absorbed in the mad contest for life, for money and pleasure and power she felt no need to lift her eyes beyond the level of her material endeavours.

He, John Hodder, was to live under that cloud, to labour under it.  The mission on which he was bound, like the prophets of old, was somehow to gain the ears of this self-absorbed population, to strike the fear of the eternal into their souls, to convince them that there was Something above and beyond that smoke which they ignored to their own peril.

Yet the task, at this nearer view, took on proportions overwhelming—­so dense was that curtain at which he gazed.  And to-day the very skies above it were leaden, as though Nature herself had turned atheist.  In spite of the vigour with which he was endowed, in spite of the belief in his own soul, doubts assailed him of his ability to cope with this problem of the modern Nineveh—­at the very moment when he was about to realize his matured ambition of a great city parish.

Leaning back on the cushioned seat, as the train started again, he reviewed the years at Bremerton, his first and only parish.  Hitherto (to his surprise, since he had been prepared for trials) he had found the religious life a primrose path.  Clouds had indeed rested on Bremerton’s crests, but beneficent clouds, always scattered by the sun.  And there, amid the dazzling snows, he had on occasions walked with God.

His success, modest though it were, had been too simple.  He had loved the people, and they him, and the pang of homesickness he now experienced was the intensest sorrow he had known since he had been among them.  Yes, Bremerton had been for him (he realized now that he had left it) as near an approach to Arcadia as this life permits, and the very mountains by which it was encircled had seemed effectively to shut out those monster problems which had set the modern world outside to seething.  Gerald Whitely’s thousand