“Er—­how long shall you be here, Alison?” he asked.  “I don’t know,” she answered, not unkindly, but with a touch of indifference.

“You treat us shamefully,” he informed her, “upon my word!  But I’m coming to call.”

“Do,” said Alison.  Hodder caught her eye again, and this time he was sure that she surprised in him a certain disdain of Mr. Atterbury’s zeal.  Her smile was faint, yet unmistakable.

He resented it.  Indeed, it was with a well-defined feeling of antagonism that he took his seat, and this was enhanced as they flew westward, Mr. Parr wholly absorbed with the speaking trumpet, energetically rebuking at every bounce.  In the back of the rector’s mind lay a weight, which he identified, at intervals, with what he was now convinced was the failure of his sermon. . .  Alison took no part in the casual conversation that began when they reached the boulevard and Mr. Parr abandoned the trumpet, but lay back in silence and apparently with entire comfort in a corner of the limousine.

At the lunch-table Mr. Parr plunged into a discussion of some of the still undecided details of the new settlement house, in which, as the plan developed, he had become more and more interested.  He had made himself responsible, from time to time, for additional sums, until the original estimate had been almost doubled.  Most of his suggestions had come from Hodder, who had mastered the subject with a thoroughness that appealed to the financier:  and he had gradually accepted the rector’s idea of concentrating on the children.  Thus he had purchased an adjoining piece of land that was to be a model playground, in connection with the gymnasium and swimming-pool.  The hygienic department was to be all that modern science could desire.

“If we are going to do the thing,” the banker would, remark, “we may as well do it thoroughly; we may as well be leaders and not followers.”

So, little by little, the scheme had grown to proportions that sometimes appalled the rector when he realized how largely he had been responsible for the additions,—­in spite of the lukewarmness with which he had begun.  And yet it had occasionally been Mr. Parr who, with a sweep of his hand, had added thousands to a particular feature:  thus the dance-hall had become, in prospect, a huge sun-parlour at the top of the building, where the children were to have their kindergartens and games in winter; and which might be shaded and opened up to the breezes in summer.  What had reconciled Hodder to the enterprise most of all, however, was the chapel —­in the plan a beautiful Gothic church—­whereby he hoped to make the religious progress keep pace with the social.  Mr. Parr was decidedly in sympathy with this intention, and referred to it now.

“I was much impressed by what you said in your sermon to-day as to the need of insisting upon authority in religious matters,” he declared, “and I quite agree that we should have a chapel of some size at the settlement house for that reason.  Those people need spiritual control.  It’s what the age needs.  And when I think of some of the sermons printed in the newspapers to-day, and which are served up as Christianity, there is only one term to apply to them—­they are criminally incendiary.”