McCrae was another puzzle. He was fifty and gaunt, with a wide flat
forehead and thinning, grey hair, and wore steel spectacles. He had a
numerous family. His speech, of which he was sparing, bore strong traces
of a Caledonian accent. And this, with the addition of the fact that he
was painstaking and methodical in his duties, and that his sermons were
orthodox in the sense that they were extremely non-committal, was all
that Hodder knew about him for many months. He never doubted, however,
the man's sincerity and loyalty.

But McCrae had a peculiar effect on him, and as time went on, his
conviction deepened that his assistant was watching him. The fact that
this tacit criticism did not seem unkindly did not greatly alleviate
the impatience that he felt from time to time. He had formed a higher
estimate of McCrae's abilities than that generally prevailing throughout
the parish; and in spite of, perhaps because of his attitude, was drawn
toward the man. This attitude, as Hodder analyzed it from the
expressions he occasionally surprised on his assistant's face, was one
of tolerance and experience, contemplating, with a faint amusement and
a certain regret, the wasteful expenditure of youthful vitality. Yet
it involved more. McCrae looked as if he knew--knew many things that
he deemed it necessary for the new rector to find out by experience.

But he was a difficult man to talk to.

If the truth be told, the more Hodder became absorbed in these activities
of the parish house, the greater grew his perplexity, the more acute his
feeling of incompleteness; or rather, his sense that the principle was
somehow fundamentally at fault. Out of the waters of the proletariat
they fished, assiduously and benignly, but at random, strange specimens!
brought them, as it were, blinking to the light, and held them by sheer