With a glance which he perceived Alison comprehended, Hodder made his way out of the room.  He had from Eldon Parr, as he passed him, neither question, acknowledgment, nor recognition.  Whatever the banker might have felt, or whether his body had now become a mere machine mechanically carrying on a life-long habit of action, the impression was one of the tremendousness of the man’s consistency.  A great effort was demanded to summon up the now almost unimaginable experience of his confidence; of the evening when, almost on that very spot, he had revealed to Hodder the one weakness of his life.  And yet the effort was not to be, presently, without startling results.  In the darkness of the street the picture suddenly grew distinct on the screen of the rector’s mind, the face of the banker subtly drawn with pain as he had looked down on it in compassion; the voice with its undercurrent of agony: 

“He never knew how much I cared—­that what I was doing was all for him, building for him, that he might carry on my work.”

V

So swift was the trolley that ten minutes had elapsed, after Hodder’s arrival, before the purr of an engine and the shriek of a brake broke the stillness of upper Dalton Street and announced the stopping of a heavy motor before the door.  The rector had found Mr. Bentley in the library, alone, seated with bent head in front of the fire, and had simply announced the intention of Eldon Parr to come.  From the chair Hodder had unobtrusively chosen, near the window, his eyes rested on the noble profile of his friend.  What his thoughts were, Hodder could not surmise; for he seemed again, marvellously, to have regained the outward peace which was the symbol of banishment from the inner man of all thought of self.

“I have prepared her for Mr. Parr’s coming,” he said to Hodder at length.

And yet he had left her there!  Hodder recalled the words Mr. Bentley had spoken, “It is her place.”  Her place, the fallen woman’s, the place she had earned by a great love and a great renunciation, of which no earthly power might henceforth deprive her . . . .

Then came the motor, the ring at the door, the entrance of Eldon Parr into the library.  He paused, a perceptible moment, on the threshold as his look fell upon the man whom he had deprived of home and fortune,—­yes and of the one woman in the world for them both.  Mr. Bentley had risen, and stood facing him.  That shining, compassionate gaze should have been indeed a difficult one to meet.  Vengeance was the Lord’s, in truth!  What ordeal that Horace Bentley in anger and retribution might have devised could have equalled this!

And yet Eldon Parr did meet it—­with an effort.  Hodder, from his corner, detected the effort, though it were barely discernible, and would have passed a scrutiny less rigid,—­the first outward and visible sign of the lesion within.  For a brief instant the banker’s eyes encountered Mr. Bentley’s look with a flash of the old defiance, and fell, and then swept the room.