By no means a negligible element in Nelson Langmaid’s professional success had been his possession of what may called a sixth sense, and more than once, on his missions of trust, he had listened to its admonitory promptings.

At times he thought he recognized these in his conversation with the Reverend John Hodder at Bremerton,—­especially in that last interview in the pleasant little study of the rectory overlooking Bremerton Lake.  But the promptings were faint, and Langmaid out of his medium.  He was not choosing the head of a trust company.

He himself felt the pull of the young clergyman’s personality, and instinctively strove to resist it:  and was more than ever struck by Mr. Hodder’s resemblance to the cliff sculpture of which he had spoken at the vestry meeting.

He was rough-hewn indeed, with gray-green eyes, and hair the color of golden sand:  it would not stay brushed.  It was this hair that hinted most strongly of individualism, that was by no means orthodox.  Langmaid felt an incongruity, but he was fascinated; and he had discovered on the rector’s shelves evidences of the taste for classical authors that he himself possessed.  Thus fate played with him, and the two men ranged from Euripides to Horace, from Horace to Dante and Gibbon.  And when Hodder got up to fetch this or that edition, he seemed to tower over the lawyer, who was a big man himself.

Then they discussed business, Langmaid describing the parish, the people, the peculiar situation in St. John’s caused by Dr. Gilman’s death, while Hodder listened.  He was not talkative; he made no promises; his reserve on occasions was even a little disconcerting; and it appealed to the lawyer from Hodder as a man, but somehow not as a clergyman.  Nor did the rector volunteer any evidences of the soundness of his theological or political principles.

He gave Langmaid the impression—­though without apparent egotism—­that by accepting the call he would be conferring a favour on St. John’s; and this was when he spoke with real feeling of the ties that bound him to Bremerton.  Langmaid felt a certain deprecation of the fact that he was not a communicant.

For the rest, if Mr. Hodder were disposed to take himself and his profession seriously, he was by no means lacking in an appreciation of Langmaid s humour . . . .

The tempering of the lawyer’s elation as he returned homeward to report to Mr. Parr and the vestry may be best expressed by his own exclamation, which he made to himself: 

“I wonder what that fellow would do if he ever got started!” A parson was, after all, a parson, and he had done his best.

IV

A high, oozing note of the brakes, and the heavy train came to a stop.  Hodder looked out of the window of the sleeper to read the sign ‘Marcion’ against the yellow brick of the station set down in the prairie mud, and flanked by a long row of dun-colored freight cars backed up to a factory.