He did not admire her the less now he had discovered that the poise was not so adjusted as he had thought it, but his feeling about her changed, grew more personal, more complicated.  She was showing an alarming tendency to lean on him at a time when he was examining with some concern his own supports.  She possessed intelligence and fascination, she was a woman whose attentions would have flattered and disturbed any man with a spark of virility, and Hodder had constantly before his eyes the spectacle of others paying her court.  Here were danger-signals again!

Mrs. Plaice, a middle-aged English lady staying in the house, never appeared until noon.  Breakfast was set out in the tiled and sheltered loggia, where they were fanned by the cool airs of a softly breathing ocean.  The world, on these mornings, had a sparkling unreality, the cold, cobalt sea stretching to sun-lit isles, and beyond, the vividly painted shore,—­the setting of luxury had never been so complete.  And the woman who sat opposite him seemed, like one of her own nectarines, to be the fruit that crowned it all.

Why not yield to the enchantment?  Why rebel, when nobody else complained?  Were it not more simple to accept what life sent in its orderly course instead of striving for an impossible and shadowy ideal?  Very shadowy indeed!  And to what end were his labours in that smoky, western city, with its heedless Dalton Streets, which went their inevitable ways?  For he had the choice.

To do him justice, he was slow in arriving at a realization that seemed to him so incredible, so preposterous.  He was her rector!  And he had accepted, all unconsciously, the worldly point of view as to Mrs. Larrabbee,—­that she was reserved for a worldly match.  A clergyman’s wife!  What would become of the clergyman?  And yet other clergymen had married rich women, despite the warning of the needle’s eye.

She drove him in her buckboard to Jordan’s Pond, set, like a jewel in the hills, and even to the deep, cliff bordered inlet beyond North East, which reminded her, she said, of a Norway fiord.  And sometimes they walked together through wooded paths that led them to beetling shores, and sat listening to the waves crashing far below.  Silences and commonplaces became the rule instead of the eager discussions with which they had begun,—­on such safer topics as the problem of the social work of modern churches.  Her aromatic presence, and in this setting, continually disturbed him:  nature’s perfumes, more definable, —­exhalations of the sea and spruce,—­mingled with hers, anaesthetics compelling lethargy.  He felt himself drowning, even wished to drown, —­and yet strangely resisted.

“I must go to-morrow,” he said.

“To-morrow—­why?  There is a dinner, you know, and Mrs. Waterman wished so particularly to meet you.”

He did not look at her.  The undisguised note of pain found an echo within him.  And this was Mrs. Larrabbee!