"You will come back, Hodder?"

"Since you wish it, sir," the rector said.

Once in the street, he faced a predicament, but swiftly decided that the
telephone was impossible under the circumstances, that there could be no
decent procedure without going himself to Park Street. It was only a
little after ten. The electric car which he caught seemed to lag, the
stops were interminable. His thoughts flew hither and thither. Should
he try first to see Alison? He was nearest to her now of all the world,
and he could not suffer the thought of her having the news otherwise.
Yes, he must tell her, since she knew nothing of the existence of Kate
Marcy.

Having settled that,--though the thought of the blow she was to receive
lay like a weight on his heart,--Mr. Bentley's reason for summoning Eldon
Parr to Dalton Street came to him. That the feelings of Mr. Bentley
towards the financier were those of Christian forgiveness was not
for a moment to be doubted: but a meeting, particularly under such
circumstances, could not but be painful indeed. It must be, it was,
Hodder saw, for Kate Marcy's sake; yes, and for Eldon Parr's as well,
that he be given this opportunity to deal with the woman whom he had
driven away from his son, and ruined.

The moon, which had shed splendours over the world the night before,
was obscured by a low-drifting mist as Hodder turned in between the
ornamental lamps that marked the gateway of the Park Street mansion,
and by some undiscerned thought--suggestion he pictured the heart-broken
woman he had left beside the body of one who had been heir to all this
magnificence. Useless now, stone and iron and glass, pictures and