"Aren't you too ambitious?" she asked gently. And again, although she
did not often blunder, she saw him wince. "I don't mean ambitious for
yourself. But surely you have made a remarkable beginning at St. John's.
Everybody admires and respects you, has confidence in you. You are so
sure of yourself," she hesitated a moment, for she had never ventured to
discuss religion with him, "of your faith. Clergymen ought not to be
apologetic, and your conviction cannot fail, in the long run, to have its
effect."

"Its effect,--on what?" he asked.

Mrs. Larrabbee was suddenly, at sea. And she prided herself on a lack of
that vagueness generally attributed to her sex.

"On--on everything. On what we were talking about,--the carnival feeling,
the levity, on the unbelief of the age. Isn't it because the control has
been taken off?"

He saw an opportunity to slip into smoother waters.

"The engine has lost its governor?"

"Exactly!" cried Mrs. Larrabbee. "What a clever simile!"

"It is Mr. Pares," said Hodder. "Only he was speaking of other symptoms,
Socialism, and its opposite, individualism,--not carnivalism."

"Poor man," said Mrs. Larrabbee, accepting the new ground as safer, yet
with a baffled feeling that Hodder had evaded her once more, "he has had