She had looked at him again, through sudden tears, as though divining his reference to Mr. Bentley’s grief, when a step make them turn.  Eldon Parr had entered the room.  Never, not even in that last interview, had his hardness seemed so concretely apparent as now.  Again, pity seemed never more out of place, yet pity was Hodder’s dominant feeling as he met the coldness, the relentlessness of the glance.  The thing that struck him, that momentarily kept closed his lips, was the awful, unconscious timeliness of the man’s entrance, and his unpreparedness to meet the blow that was to crush him.

“May I ask, Mr. Hodder,” he said, in an unemotional voice, “what you are doing in this house?”

Still Hodder hesitated, an unwilling executioner.

“Father,” said Alison, “Mr. Hodder has come with a message.”

Never, perhaps, had Eldon Parr given such complete proof of his lack of spiritual intuition.  The atmosphere, charged with presage for him, gave him nothing.

“Mr. Hodder takes a strange way of delivering it,” was his comment.

Mercy took precedence over her natural directness.  She laid her hand gently on his arm.  And she had, at that instant, no thought of the long years he had neglected her for her brother.

“It’s about—­Preston,” she said.

“Preston!” The name came sharply from Eldon Parr’s lips.  “What about him?  Speak, can’t you?”

“He died this evening,” said Alison, simply.

Hodder plainly heard the ticking of the clock on the mantel . . . .  And the drama that occurred was the more horrible because it was hidden; played, as it were, behind closed doors.  For the spectators, there was only the black wall, and the silence.  Eldon Parr literally did nothing, —­made no gesture, uttered no cry.  The death, they knew, was taking place in his soul, yet the man stood before them, naturally, for what seemed an interminable time . . . .

“Where is he?” he asked.

“At Mr. Bentley’s, in Dalton Street.”  It was Alison who replied again.

Even then he gave no sign that he read retribution in the coincidence, betrayed no agitation at the mention of a name which, in such a connection, might well have struck the terror of judgment into his heart.  They watched him while, with a firm step, he crossed the room and pressed a button in the wall, and waited.

“I want the closed automobile, at once,” he said, when the servant came.

“I beg pardon; sir, but I think Gratton has gone to bed.  He had no orders.”

“Then wake him,” said Eldon Parr, “instantly.  And send for my secretary.”