“One of the finest I ever heard—­if not the finest,” Mr. Plimpton declared, with a kind of serious ‘empressement’, squeezing his hand.

Others stopped him; Everett Constable, for one, and the austere Mrs. Atterbury.  Hodder would have avoided the ever familiar figure of her son, Gordon, in the invariable black cutaway and checked trousers, but he was standing beside Mr. Parr.

“Ahem!  Why, Mr. Hodder,” he exclaimed, squinting off his glasses, “that was a magnificent effort.  I was saying to Mr. Parr that it isn’t often one hears a sermon nowadays as able as that, and as sound.  Many clergymen refrain from preaching them, I sometimes think, because they are afraid people won’t like them.”

“I scarcely think it’s that,” the rector replied, a little shortly.  “We’re afraid people won’t heed them.”

He became aware, as he spoke, of a tall young woman, who had cast an enigmatic glance first at Gordon Atterbury, and then at himself.

“It was a good sermon,” said Mr. Parr.  “You’re coming to lunch, Hodder?”

The rector nodded.  “I’m ready when you are,” he answered.

“The motor’s waiting,” said the banker, leading the way down the steps to the sidewalk, where he turned.  “Alison, let me introduce Mr. Hodder.  This is my daughter,” he added simply.

This sudden disclosure of the young woman’s identity had upon Hodder a certain electric effect, and with it came a realization of the extent to which—­from behind the scenes, so to speak—­she had gradually aroused him to a lively speculation.  She seemed to have influenced, to a greater or less degree, so many lives with which he had come into touch!  Compelled persons to make up their minds about her!  And while he sympathized with Eldon Parr in his abandonment, he had never achieved the full condemnation which he felt—­an impartial Christian morality would have meted out.

As he uttered the conventional phrase and took her hand, he asked himself whether her personality justified his interest.  Her glance at Gordon Atterbury in the midst of that gentleman’s felicitations on the sermon had been expressive, Hodder thought, of veiled amusement slightly tinctured with contempt; and he, Hodder, felt himself to have grown warm over it.  He could not be sure that Alison Parr had not included, in her inner comment, the sermon likewise, on which he had so spent himself.  What was she doing at church?  As her eyes met his own, he seemed to read a challenge.  He had never encountered a woman—­he decided—­who so successfully concealed her thought, and at the same time so incited curiosity about it.

The effect of her reappearance on Gordon Atterbury was painfully apparent, and Mrs. Larrabbee’s remark, “that he had never got over it,” recurred to Hodder.  He possessed the virtue of being faithful, at least, in spite of the lady’s apostasy, and he seemed to be galvanized into a tenfold nervousness as he hustled after them and handed her, with the elaborate attention little men are apt to bestow upon women, into the motor.