He was ushered into a library where the shades were already drawn, where a-white-clothed tea-table was set before the fire, the red rays dancing on the silver tea-kettle.  On the centre-table he was always sure to find, neatly set in a rack, the books about which the world was talking, or rather would soon begin to talk; and beside them were ranged magazines; French, English, and American, Punch, the Spectator, the Nation, the ‘Revue des deux Mondes’.  Like the able general she was, Mrs. Constable kept her communications open, and her acquaintance was by no means confined to the city of her nativity.  And if a celebrity were passing through, it were pretty safe, if in doubt, to address him in her care.

Hodder liked and admired her, but somehow she gave him the impression of having attained her ascendancy at a price, an ascendancy which had apparently been gained by impressing upon her environment a new note —­literary, aesthetic, cosmopolitan.  She held herself, and those she carried with her, abreast of the times, and he was at a loss to see how so congenial an effort could have left despite her sweetness—­the little mark of hardness he discerned, of worldliness.  For she was as well born as any woman in the city, and her husband was a Constable.  He had inherited, so the rector had been informed, one of those modest fortunes that were deemed affluence in the eighties.  His keeping abreast of the times was the enigma, and Hodder had often wondered how financial genius had contrived to house itself in the well-dressed, gently pompous little man whose lack of force seemed at times so painfully evident.  And yet he was rated one of the rich men of the city, and his name Hodder had read on many boards with Mr. Parr’s!

A person more versed in the modern world of affairs than the late rector of Bremerton would not have been so long in arriving at the answer to this riddle.  Hodder was astute, he saw into people more than they suspected, but he was not sophisticated.

He stood picturing, now, the woman in answer to whose summons he had come.  With her finely chiselled features, her abundant white hair, her slim figure and erect carriage she reminded him always of a Vigee Lebrun portrait.  He turned at the sound of her voice behind him.

“How good of you to come, Mr. Hodder, when you were so busy,” she said, taking his hand as she seated herself behind the tea-kettle.  “I wanted the chance to talk to you, and it seemed the best way.  What is that you have, Soter’s book?”

“I pinked it up on the table,” he explained.

“Then you haven’t read it?  You ought to.  As a clergyman, it would interest you.  Religion treated from the economic side, you know, the effect of lack of nutrition on character.  Very unorthodox, of course.”

“I find that I have very little time to read,” he said.  “I sometimes take a book along in the cars.”

“Your profession is not so leisurely as it once was, I often think it such a pity.  But you, too, are paying the penalty of complexity.”  She smiled at him sympathetically.  “How is Mr. Parr?  I haven’t seen him for several weeks.”