All of which is merely in the nature of a commentary on Mr. Langmaid’s genius.  His reputation for judgment—­which by some is deemed the highest of human qualities—­was impaired; and a man who in his time had selected presidents of banks and trust companies could certainly be trusted to choose a parson—­particularly if the chief requirements were not of a spiritual nature. . .

A week later he boarded an east-bound limited train, armed with plenary powers.

His destination was the hill town where he had spent the first fifteen years of his life, amid the most striking of New England landscapes, and the sight of the steep yet delicately pastoral slopes never failed to thrill him as the train toiled up the wide valley to Bremerton.  The vision of these had remained with him during the years of his toil in the growing Western city, and embodied from the first homesick days an ideal to which he hoped sometime permanently to return.  But he never had.  His family had shown a perversity of taste in preferring the sea, and he had perforce been content with a visit of a month or so every other summer, accompanied usually by his daughter, Helen.  On such occasions, he stayed with his sister, Mrs. Whitely.

The Whitely mills were significant of the new Bremerton, now neither village nor city, but partaking of the characteristics of both.  French Canadian might be heard on the main square as well as Yankee; and that revolutionary vehicle, the automobile, had inspired there a great brick edifice with a banner called the Bremerton House.  Enterprising Italians had monopolized the corners with fruit stores, and plate glass and asphalt were in evidence.  But the hills looked down unchanged, and in the cool, maple-shaded streets, though dotted with modern residences, were the same demure colonial houses he had known in boyhood.

He was met at the station by his sister, a large, matronly woman who invariably set the world whizzing backward for Langmaid; so completely did she typify the contentment, the point of view of an age gone by.  For life presented no more complicated problems to the middle-aged Mrs. Whitely than it had to Alice Langmaid.

“I know what you’ve come for, Nelson,” she said reproachfully, when she greeted him at the station.  “Dr. Gilman’s dead, and you want our Mr. Hodder.  I feel it in my bones.  Well, you can’t get him.  He’s had ever so many calls, but he won’t leave Bremerton.”

She knew perfectly well, however, that Nelson would get him, although her brother characteristically did not at once acknowledge his mission.  Alice Whitely had vivid memories of a childhood when he had never failed to get what he wanted; a trait of his of which, although it had before now caused her much discomfort, she was secretly inordinately proud.  She was, therefore, later in the day not greatly surprised to find herself supplying her brother with arguments.  Much as they admired and loved Mr. Hodder, they had always realized that he could not remain buried in Bremerton.  His talents demanded a wider field.