McCrae was another puzzle.  He was fifty and gaunt, with a wide flat forehead and thinning, grey hair, and wore steel spectacles.  He had a numerous family.  His speech, of which he was sparing, bore strong traces of a Caledonian accent.  And this, with the addition of the fact that he was painstaking and methodical in his duties, and that his sermons were orthodox in the sense that they were extremely non-committal, was all that Hodder knew about him for many months.  He never doubted, however, the man’s sincerity and loyalty.

But McCrae had a peculiar effect on him, and as time went on, his conviction deepened that his assistant was watching him.  The fact that this tacit criticism did not seem unkindly did not greatly alleviate the impatience that he felt from time to time.  He had formed a higher estimate of McCrae’s abilities than that generally prevailing throughout the parish; and in spite of, perhaps because of his attitude, was drawn toward the man.  This attitude, as Hodder analyzed it from the expressions he occasionally surprised on his assistant’s face, was one of tolerance and experience, contemplating, with a faint amusement and a certain regret, the wasteful expenditure of youthful vitality.  Yet it involved more.  McCrae looked as if he knew—­knew many things that he deemed it necessary for the new rector to find out by experience.

But he was a difficult man to talk to.

If the truth be told, the more Hodder became absorbed in these activities of the parish house, the greater grew his perplexity, the more acute his feeling of incompleteness; or rather, his sense that the principle was somehow fundamentally at fault.  Out of the waters of the proletariat they fished, assiduously and benignly, but at random, strange specimens! brought them, as it were, blinking to the light, and held them by sheer struggling.  And sometimes, when they slipped away, dived after them.  The young curate, Mr. Tompkinson, for the most part did the diving; or, in scriptural language, the searching after the lost sheep.

The results accomplished seemed indeed, as Mr. Parr had remarked, strangely disproportionate to the efforts, for they laboured abundantly.  The Italian mothers appeared stolidly appreciative of the altruism of Miss Ramsay, who taught the kindergarten, in taking their charges off their hands for three hours of a morning, and the same might be said of the Jews and Germans and Russians.  The newsboys enjoyed the gymnasium and reading-rooms:  some of them were drafted into the choir, yet the singing of Te Deums failed somehow to accomplish the miracle of regeneration.  The boys, as a rule, were happier, no doubt; the new environments not wholly without results.  But the rector was an idealist.