“I don’t misunderstand ye,” answered McCrae.  He leaned a little forward, staring at the rector from behind his steel spectacles with a glance which had become piercing.

“And I am going to discourage a charity which is a mockery of Christianity,” Hodder went on, “the spectacle of which turns thousands of men and women in sickening revolt against the Church of Christ to-day.  I have discovered, at last, how some of these persons have made their money, and are making it.  And I am going to let them know, since they have repudiated God in their own souls, since they have denied the Christian principle of individual responsibility, that I, as the vicar of God, will not be a party to the transaction of using the Church as a means of doling out ill-gotten gains to the poor.”

“Mr. Parr!” McCrae exclaimed.

“Yes,” said the rector, slowly, and with a touch of sadness, “since you have mentioned him, Mr. Parr.  But I need not say that this must go no farther.  I am in possession of definite facts in regard to Mr. Parr which I shall present to him when he returns.”

“Ye’ll tell him to his face?”

“It is the only way.”

McCrae had risen.  A remarkable transformation had come over the man, —­he was reminiscent, at that moment, of some Covenanter ancestor going into battle.  And his voice shook with excitement.

“Ye may count on me, Mr. Hodder,” he cried.  “These many years I’ve waited, these many years I’ve seen what ye see now, but I was not the man.  Aye, I’ve watched ye, since the day ye first set foot in this church.  I knew what was going on inside of ye, because it was just that I felt myself.  I hoped—­I prayed ye might come to it.”

The sight of this taciturn Scotchman, moved in this way, had an extraordinary effect on Hodder himself, and his own emotion was so inexpressibly stirred that he kept silence a moment to control it.  This proof of the truth of his theory in regard to McCrae he found overwhelming.

“But you said nothing, McCrae,” he began presently.  “I felt all along that you knew what was wrong—­if you had only spoken.”

“I could not,” said McCrae.  “I give ye my word I tried, but I just could not.  Many’s the time I wanted to—­but I said to myself, when I looked at you, ‘wait, it will come, much better than ye can say it.’  And ye have made me see more than I saw, Mr. Hodder,—­already ye have.  Ye’ve got the whole thing in ye’re eye, and I only had a part of it.  It’s because ye’re the bigger man of the two.”

“You thought I’d come to it?” demanded Hodder, as though the full force of this insight had just struck him.

“Well,” said McCrae, “I hoped.  It seemed, to look at ye, ye’r true nature—­what was by rights inside of ye.  That’s the best explaining I can do.  And I call to mind that time ye spoke about not making the men in the classes Christians—­that was what started me to thinking.”

“And you asked me,” returned the rector, “how welcome some of them would be in Mr. Parr’s Pew.”