She did not live, alas, to enjoy for long the Medicean magnificence of the mansion facing the Park, to be a companion moon in the greater orbit.  Eldon Part’s grief was real, and the beautiful English window in the south transept of the church bears witness to it.  And yet it cannot be said that he sought solace in religion, so apparently steeped in it had he always been.  It was destiny that he should take his place on the vestry; destiny, indeed, that he should ultimately become the vestry as well as the first layman of the diocese; unobtrusively, as he had accomplished everything else in life, in spite of Prestons and Warings, Atterburys, Goodriches, and Gores.  And he was wont to leave his weighty business affairs to shift for themselves while he attended the diocesan and general conventions of his Church.

He gave judiciously, as becomes one who holds a fortune in trust, yet generously, always permitting others to help, until St. John’s was a very gem of finished beauty.  And, as the Rothschilds and the Fuggera made money for grateful kings and popes, so in a democratic age, Eldon Parr became the benefactor of an adulatory public.  The university, the library, the hospitals, and the parks of his chosen city bear witness.

II

For forty years, Dr. Gilman had been the rector of St. John’s.  One Sunday morning, he preached his not unfamiliar sermon on the text, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face,” and when the next Sunday dawned he was in his grave in Winterbourne Cemetery, sincerely mourned within the parish and without.  In the nature of mortal things, his death was to be expected:  no less real was the crisis to be faced At the vestry meeting that followed, the problem was tersely set forth by Eldon Parr, his frock coat tightly buttoned about his chest, his glasses in his hand.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “we have to fulfil a grave responsibility to the parish, to the city, and to God.  The matter of choosing a rector to-day, when clergymen are meddling with all sorts of affairs which do not concern them, is not so simple as it was twenty years ago.  We have, at St. John’s, always been orthodox and dignified, and I take it to be the sense of this vestry that we remain so.  I conceive it our duty to find a man who is neither too old nor too young, who will preach the faith as we received it, who is not sensational, and who does not mistake socialism for Christianity.”

By force of habit, undoubtedly, Mr. Parr glanced at Nelson Langmaid as he sat down.  Innumerable had been the meetings of financial boards at which Mr. Parr had glanced at Langmaid, who had never failed to respond.  He was that sine qua non of modern affairs, a corporation lawyer,—­although he resembled a big and genial professor of Scandinavian extraction.  He wore round, tortoise-shell spectacles, he had a high, dome-like forehead, and an ample light brown beard which he stroked from time to time.  It is probable that he did not believe in the immortality of the soul.