perceived clearly that he could not have given her what she desired, since the marriage would have killed it in him.  She offered him the other thing.  Once again he had managed somehow to cling to his dream of what the relationship between man and woman should be, and he saw more and more distinctly that he had coveted not only the jewel, but its setting.  He could not see her out of it—­she faded.  Nor could he see himself in it.

Luxury,—­of course,—­that was what he had spurned.  Luxury in contrast to Dalton Street, to the whirring factories near the church which discharged, at nightfall, their quotas of wan women and stunted children.  And yet here he was catering to luxury, providing religion for it!  Religion!

Early in November he heard that Mrs. Larrabbee had suddenly decided to go abroad without returning home. . . .

That winter Hodder might have been likened to a Niagara for energy; an unharnessed Niagara—­such would have been his own comment.  He seemed to turn no wheels, or only a few at least, and feebly.  And while the spectacle of their rector’s zeal was no doubt an edifying one to his parishioners, they gave him to understand that they would have been satisfied with less.  They admired, but chided him gently; and in February Mr. Parr offered to take him to Florida.  He was tired, and it was largely because he dreaded the reflection inevitable in a period of rest, that he refused. . . .  And throughout these months, the feeling recurred, with increased strength, that McCrae was still watching him, —­the notion persisted that his assistant held to a theory of his own, if he could but be induced to reveal it.  Hodder refrained from making the appeal.  Sometimes he was on the point of losing patience with this enigmatic person.

Congratulations on the fact that his congregation was increasing brought him little comfort, since a cold analysis of the newcomers who were renting pews was in itself an indication of the lack of that thing he so vainly sought.  The decorous families who were now allying themselves with St. John’s did so at the expense of other churches either more radical or less fashionable.  What was it he sought?  What did he wish?  To fill the church to overflowing with the poor and needy as well as the rich, and to enter into the lives of all.  Yet at a certain point he met a resistance that was no less firm because it was baffling.  The Word, on his lips at least, seemed to have lost it efficacy.  The poor heeded it not, and he preached to the rich as from behind a glass.  They went on with their carnival.  Why this insatiate ambition on his part in an age of unbelief?  Other clergymen, not half so fortunate, were apparently satisfied; or else—­from his conversation with them—­either oddly optimistic or resigned.  Why not he?

It was strange, in spite of everything, that hope sprang up within him, a recurrent geyser.