It came to Hodder as the completing touch of the revelation he had half glimpsed by the bedside.
“Ah,” he could not help exclaiming, “that explains much.”
She had looked at him again, through sudden tears, as though divining his reference to Mr. Bentley's grief, when a step make them turn. Eldon Parr had entered the room. Never, not even in that last interview, had his hardness seemed so concretely apparent as now. Again, pity seemed never more out of place, yet pity was Hodder's dominant feeling as he met the coldness, the relentlessness of the glance. The thing that struck him, that momentarily kept closed his lips, was the awful, unconscious timeliness of the man's entrance, and his unpreparedness to meet the blow that was to crush him.
“May I ask, Mr. Hodder,” he said, in an unemotional voice, “what you are doing in this house?”
Still Hodder hesitated, an unwilling executioner.
“Father,” said Alison, “Mr. Hodder has come with a message.”
Never, perhaps, had Eldon Parr given such complete proof of his lack of spiritual intuition. The atmosphere, charged with presage for him, gave him nothing.
“Mr. Hodder takes a strange way of delivering it,” was his comment.
Mercy took precedence over her natural directness. She laid her hand gently on his arm. And she had, at that instant, no thought of the long years he had neglected her for her brother.
“It's about—Preston,” she said.