The night when he had stumbled into the cafe in Dalton Street might well
have been termed the nadir of Hodder's experience. His faith had been
blotted out, and, with it had suddenly been extinguished all spiritual
sense, The beast had taken possession. And then, when it was least
expected,--nay, when despaired of, had come the glimmer of a light;
distant, yet clear. He might have traced the course of his
disillusionment, perhaps, but cause and effect were not discernible here.

They soon became so, and in the weeks that followed he grew to have the
odd sense of a guiding hand on his shoulder,--such was his instinctive
interpretation of it, rather than the materialistic one of things
ordained. He might turn, in obedience to what seemed a whim, either to
the right or left, only to recognize new blazes that led him on with
surer step; and trivial accidents became events charged with meaning.
He lived in continual wonder.

One broiling morning, for instance, he gathered up the last of the books
whose contents he had a month before so feverishly absorbed, and which
had purged him of all fallacies. At first he had welcomed them with a
fierce relief, sucked them dry, then looked upon them with loathing. Now
he pressed them gratefully, almost tenderly, as he made his way along the
shady side of the street towards the great library set in its little
park.

He was reminded, as he passed from the blinding sunlight into the cool
entrance hall, with its polished marble stairway and its statuary, that
Eldon Parr's munificence had made the building possible: that some day
Mr. Parr's bust would stand in that vestibule with that of Judge Henry
Goodrich--Philip Goodrich's grandfather--and of other men who had served
their city and their commonwealth.