interests of any sort. She had, indeed, once bluntly told him that
church meant nothing to her . . . .

In that little company gathered in the choir room were certain members of
his congregation whom, had he taken thought, he would least have expected
to see. There were Mr. and Mrs. Bradley, an elderly couple who had
attended St. John's for thirty years; and others of the same
unpretentious element of his parish who were finding in modern life an
increasingly difficult and bewildering problem. There was little Miss
Tallant, an assiduous guild worker whom he had thought the most orthodox
of persons; Miss Ramsay, who taught the children of the Italian mothers;
Mr. Carton, the organist, a professed free-thinker, with whom Hodder had
had many a futile argument; and Martha Preston, who told him that he had
made her think about religion seriously for the first time in her life.

And there were others, types equally diverse. Young men of the choir,
and others whom he had never seen, who informed him shyly that they would
come again, and bring their friends . . . .

And all the while, in the background, Hodder had been aware of a familiar
face--Horace Bentley's. Beside him, when at length he drew near, was his
friend Asa Waring--a strangely contrasted type. The uncompromising eyes
of a born leader of men flashed from beneath the heavy white eyebrows,
the button of the Legion of Honour gleaming in his well-kept coat seemed
emblematic of the fire which in his youth had driven him forth to fight
for the honour of his country--a fire still undimmed. It was he who
spoke first.

"This is a day I never expected to see, Mr. Hodder," he said, "for it has
brought back to this church the man to whom it owes its existence. Mr.