Lost in reflection, he walked eastward with long and rapid strides, striving to reduce to order in his mind the impressions the visit had given him, only to find them too complex, too complicated by unlooked-for emotions.  Before its occurrence, he had, in spite of an inherent common sense, felt a little uneasiness over the prospective meeting with the financier.  And Nelson Langmaid had hinted, good-naturedly, that it was his, Hodder’s, business, to get on good terms with Mr. Parr—­otherwise the rectorship of St. John’s might not prove abed of roses.  Although the lawyer had spoken with delicacy, he had once more misjudged his man—­the result being to put Hodder on his guard.  He had been the more determined not to cater to the banker.

The outcome of it all had been that the rector left him with a sense of having crossed barriers forbidden to other men, and not understanding how he had crossed them.  Whether this incipient intimacy were ominous or propitious, whether there were involved in it a germ (engendered by a radical difference of temperament) capable of developing into future conflict, he could not now decide.  If Eldon Parr were Procrustes he, Hodder, had fitted the bed, and to say the least, this was extraordinary, if not a little disquieting.  Now and again his thoughts reverted to the garden, and to the woman who had made it.  Why had she deserted?

At length, after he had been walking for nearly an hour, he halted and looked about him.  He was within a few blocks of the church, a little to one side of Tower Street, the main east and west highway of the city, in the midst of that district in which Mr. Parr had made the remark that poverty was inevitable.  Slovenly and depressing at noonday, it seemed now frankly to have flung off its mask.  Dusk was gathering, and with it a smoke-stained fog that lent a sickly tinge to the lights.  Women slunk by him:  the saloons, apparently closed, and many houses with veiled windows betrayed secret and sinister gleams.  In the midst of a block rose a tall, pretentious though cheaply constructed building with the words “Hotel Albert” in flaming electric letters above an archway.  Once more his eye read Dalton Street on a lamp . . . .

Hodder resumed his walk more slowly, and in a few minutes reached his rooms in the parish house.

CHAPTER IV

SOME RIDDLES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

I Although he found the complications of a modern city parish somewhat bewildering, the new rector entered into his duties that winter with apostolic zeal.  He was aware of limitations and anomalies, but his faith was boundless, his energy the subject of good-natured comment by his vestry and parishioners, whose pressing invitations’ to dinners he was often compelled to refuse.  There was in John Hodder something indefinable that inflamed curiosity and left it unsatisfied.