The Brentons

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NOVELS BY

ANNA CHAPIN RAY

THE DOMINANT STRAIN BY THE GOOD STE. ANNE ON THE FIRING LINE HEARTS AND CREEDS ACKROYD OF THE FACULTY QUICKENED THE BRIDGE BUILDERS OVER THE QUICKSANDS A WOMAN WITH A PURPOSE THE BRENTONS

[Illustration: Catia put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands around her cup.

Frontispiece. _See Page_ 84]

THE BRENTONS

BY

ANNA CHAPIN RAY

Author of "A Woman with a Purpose," "The Bridge Builders," etc.

WITH FRONTISPIECE BY WILSON C. DEXTER

BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1912

_Copyright, 1912,_ By Little, Brown, and Company.

_All rights reserved_

Published, January, 1912

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

Transcriber's Note:

Beginning with Chapter 19 the spelling of Kathryn inexplicably changes to Katherine.

The Table of Contents is not contained in the original book. It has been generated for the convenience of the reader.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER NINETEEN CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER TWENTY CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER THIRTY CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE CHAPTER SIXTEEN CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

THE BRENTONS

CHAPTER ONE

However archaic and conventional it may sound, it is the literal fact that young Scott Brenton was led into the ministry by the prayer of his widowed mother. Furthermore, the prayer was not made to him, but offered in secret and in all sincerity at the Throne of Grace.

"Oh, my dearest Lord and Master," she prayed, at her evening devotions upon her knees and with her work-roughened hands clasped upon the gaudy patchwork quilt; "guide Thou my son. Bring him to feel that his perfect happiness can come only from going forth to preach Thy word to all men."

And, as it chanced, the door of her room had been left slightly open. Scott Brenton, young and alert and full of enthusiasms which his years of grinding work and economy had been powerless to down, came leaping up the steps just then. The front door had been left unlocked for him. He closed it noiselessly behind him, and then started to run up the stairs. The murmur of his mother's voice checked him, stayed his step a moment, and then changed its pace. He went on up the stairs quite soberly, thoughtful, his face a little overcast.

It was now the middle of the Christmas holidays of his junior year. The day he had left college for the short vacation, his chemistry professor had sent for him and had said things to him about his last term's work and about his examination papers at the end of the term. The things were courteous as concerned the past; to Scott Brenton's mind, they were dazzling as concerned the future. The dazzle had endured until his mother's words had fallen on his ears. Then it had eclipsed itself, leaving him to wonder whether, after all, it had not been the _ignis fatuus_ of self-elation, and not the steady glow of truth. Scott Brenton was not much more given to introspection, at that epoch of his life, than is any other healthy youngster of nineteen. None the less, he slept curiously little, that night.

Next morning, while he dressed, he kept his teeth shut cornerwise, a habit he had when he was making up his mind to any noxious undertaking. Then he went downstairs, to find his mother smiling contentedly to herself, while she added the finishing touches to the breakfast. It was sausage, that morning, Scott Brenton always remembered afterwards. They had been chosen out of deference to his boyish appetite. He never tasted them again, if he could help it. They seemed to have added to their already strange assortment of flavours a tang of bitterness that bore the seeds of spiritual indigestion.

His mother looked up to greet him with an eagerness from which she vainly sought to banish pride. He was her only child, her all; and he was sufficiently good to look upon, clever enough to pass muster in a crowd. To her adoring eyes, however, he was a mingling of an Adonis with a Socrates. And she herself, by encouragement and admonition and self-denying toil, had helped to make him what he was. Small wonder that her pride in him could never be completely downed! Nevertheless,--

"Have a good time, last night?" she asked him tamely.

But she missed a certain young enthusiasm from his accent, as he answered,--

"Fine!"

"Catie there?" she asked again, with the crisp elision of one whose life has been too strenuous to waste itself in the more leisurely forms of speech.

"Yes. Is breakfast ready?"

She nodded, as she speared the sizzling sausages one by one and transferred them to a platter. Then, while she poured off a little of the fat by way of gravy, she put yet another question.

"Look pretty?" she said.

Her son felt no difficulty in applying the question to Catie, the proper object, rather than to the sausages on which his mother's gaze was bent.

"About as usual," he said temperately.

His mother laughed out suddenly. The laugh brought back to her face a faint resemblance to the girl who, as the pretty daughter of old Parson Wheeler, had been the acknowledged belle of all the small community. Later on, all the small community had been jarred to its social foundations by the discovery that Betty Wheeler, child of a long, long line of parsons, was going to marry Birge Brenton who had come to "clerk it" in the village store. She did marry him, and, a little later on, and most obligingly for all concerned, he died. Few people mourned him. His wife, though, was among the few. She had a conscience of Puritan extraction, and the keenest possible sense of what was seemly.

Scott, at the time, was ten days old; therefore he did not share her mourning. Indeed, he was too busy trying to adjust himself to things in general and pins in particular to have much energy or time left over to spare for thinking about other people. Already, the trail of Mrs. Brenton's reading ancestors had led her to the naming her child Walter Scott. Her sense of decorum caused her to wonder vaguely, after her husband died, whether it would not be proper to change the baby's name to Birge. Her wonderings, though, merely served to render her uneasy; they bore no fruit in action. The associations with the name were not of the sort she cared to emphasize, and the boy was allowed to keep his more impressive label.

As time went on, though, he rebelled against the childish Wally and insisted on the Scott, but prefixed by the blank initial whose significance, he fondly hoped, would permanently remain a mystery. A month, however, after he had entered college, he was known as Ivanhoe to all the class who knew anything about him at all; and, in the catalogue published in his sophomore year, he was registered quite curtly as Scott Brenton. Never again in all his lifetime did the incriminating _W_ reappear.

If his mother felt regretful for the change, she was far too wise to show it. Indeed, it is quite likely that she felt no regrets at all. By the time that Scott came to his 'teens, Mrs. Brenton was doing her level and conscientious best to conceal from him the demoralizing fact of her belief that he could do almost no wrong, and she clung to the modifying _almost_ with a passionate fervour born of her clerical ancestry and her consequent belief in the inherent viciousness of unconverted man. Moreover, her inherited notions of conversion included spiritual writhings and physical night-sweats and penitential tears by way of its accomplishment. According to the creed of all the Parson Wheelers since the Puritan migration, one became a Christian rather violently, and not by leisurely unfolding. It had been to her the greatest of all reliefs since the unconfessed one born of her husband's premature removal, when the young Walter Scott had got himself converted by means of an itinerant revivalist. From that time on, her gaze had been fixed unfalteringly upon the hour when he should assume the mantle of his clerical grandparents; and she inclined to look upon his other talents as being so many manifestations of diabolic ingenuity.

And now, these Christmas holidays, the diabolism seemed to her to be rampant; it effervesced through all Scott's being like the mysterious things he brewed within his test-tubes. Not that Mrs. Brenton would have known a test-tube by sight, however. She only had gleaned from her son's talk the fact that they existed and held fizzy compounds which would kill you, if you drank them. Perhaps her analogy was all the better for her lack of specific knowledge. In any case, she saw and feared the effervescence. The sausages and the white bowl of hot fat gravy were so much carefully considered bait to lure her son back into the paths of orthodox uprightness. While they were being swallowed--slowly, by reason of their mussiness--she had certain things she wished to say to him.

To her extreme surprise, Scott said them first to her.

"Mother," he said, a little bit imperiously considering his age; "no matter now about Catie. I want to talk to you about--"

"About?" she queried nervously, while he hesitated under what obviously was a pretext of picking out the brownest sausage.

"About--myself."

Her nervousness increased.

"Take some more gravy, Scott," she urged him hurriedly. "You'd better dip it on your bread as soon as you can; it gets cold so soon, these winter mornings."

But he ignored the spoon she offered him. When he spoke, it was with a curious hesitation.

"Mother, did I tell you what Professor Mansfield said?"

"Yes."

"Weren't you glad--just a very little?" His tone was boyish in its pleading.

Mrs. Brenton's answer was evasive.

"Of course, Scott. I am always glad, when your teachers speak well of you," she said.

"Yes; but think of it," he urged impatiently. "I hate to brag, mother; but do you take in all he meant: that he saw no reason, if I kept on, that I should not make a record as a chemist?"

While he spoke, his gray eyes were fixed on her imploringly. Under some conditions and in some connections, she would have been swift to read in them the text of his unspoken prayer; but not now. Her ancestral tendencies forbade: those and the doubts which centred in her son's other heritage, less orthodox and far, far less under the domination of the spiritual. Now and then the boy looked like his father, astoundingly like, and disturbingly. This was one of the times.

Across his young enthusiasm, her answer fell like a wet linen sheet.

"But are you going to keep on?"

He tried to regain his former accent.

"That is what I want to decide, right now," he said as buoyantly as he was able. "Of course, it isn't just what I started out to do; but he seemed to feel it was my chance, and you and I, both of us, have been used to taking any chance that came. What do you think I'd better do?"

For a moment, she worked fussily at the twisted wire leg of the tile that held the coffee pot. Her eyes were still upon the wire, when at last she answered.

"You must do as you think right, my son."

"But what do you really think, yourself?" he urged her.

This time, she lifted her eyes until they rested full upon his own.

"It isn't exactly what we have planned it all for, Scott. Still, it may be that this will be the next best thing, after all."

"Then you would be disappointed, if I took the chance?"

She felt the edge of the coming renunciation in his voice and in his half-unconscious change of tense, and she dropped her eyes again, for fear they should betray the gladness that she felt, and so should hurt him.

"Do you need to decide just now?" she asked evasively.

"Between now and next summer."

"Why not wait till then?"

He crossed her question with another.

"What's the use of waiting?"

"You may get more light on it, if you wait," she said gravely.

Scott shut his teeth hard upon an end of sausage. It seemed to him that it was only one more phase of the same futile whole, when his teeth encountered a hard bit of bone. And his mother sat there, outwardly impartial, inwardly disapproving, and talked about more light, when already his young eyes were blinded by the lustrous dazzle. Oh, well! It was all in the day's work, all in the difference between nineteen and thirty-nine, he told himself as patiently as he was able. And his mother at thirty-nine, he realized with disconcerting clearness, was infinitely older than Professor Mansfield's wife at sixty. Indeed, he sometimes wondered if she ever had been really young, ever really young enough to forget her heritage of piety in healthy, worldly zeal. Whatever the depths of one's filial devotion, it sometimes jars a little to have one's mother use, by choice, the phraseology of the minor prophets. In fact, in certain of his more unregenerate moments, Scott Brenton had allowed himself to marvel that he had not been christened Malachi. At least, it would have been in keeping with the habitual tone of the domestic table talk. And yet, in other moments, he realized acutely that that same heritage was in his nature, too. The village gossips had been exceedingly benevolent, in that they had spared him any inkling of the sources whence had come certain other strains which set his blood to tingling every now and then.

Just such a strain was tingling now, as he laid down his knife and fork, rested his elbows on the table before him and clasped his hands tight above his plate.

"I think I have all the light I am likely to get, mother," he said steadily.

"But, if the light within thee be--"

He checked her with a sudden petulant lift of his head. And, after all, it was not quite her fault. Life, for her, had been so hard and so busy that he ought not to grudge her the consolation she had been able to dig up out of the accumulated _débris_ of the ancestral trick of sermonizing. In a more gracious, plastic existence, she would have taken it out in Browning and the Russians; yet she was not necessarily more narrow because her literary artists were pre-Messianic. Neither was it the fault of those same artists that they were quoted in and out of season, and always for the purpose of clinching an obnoxious point.

"It isn't," he said, as quietly as he was able. Then the boyishness pent up within him came bursting out once more. "Listen, mother," he said impetuously. "Really, this thing has got to be talked out between us to the very dregs. We may as well face it now as ever, and come to the final conclusion. I know you started out to make me into a minister. I know you feel that it is the one great profession of them all. But is it?"

For a minute, her hands gripped each other; but they were underneath the hanging edge of tablecloth, and so invisible to Scott.

"What can be greater than to speak the truth that makes us free?" she questioned.

"Isn't there more than one kind of truth, mother?" he challenged her.

"How can there be?"

Again he shut his teeth and swallowed down his opposition. He was too immature to argue that there might be different facets to the selfsame truth.

"Listen, mother," he began again, when he had proved to himself that he could rely upon his self-control. "As I say, I started out to be a minister, to be another Parson Wheeler in fact, if not in name. I know it has been your dream to hear me preach, some day or other. And I know how you have pinched and scrimped and worked, to give me the education that I was bound to need."

"You have worked, too, Scott," she told him, in swift generosity. "You have tugged along and gone without things and worked hard, in your books and out of them. You know I have been proud of you; the credit for it isn't all mine, by any means."

His young face flushed and softened. Unclasping his hands, he leaned across the table and laid his palm upon her fingers as they rested on the cloth beside her plate. Both palm and fingers were roughened and callous with hard work; but mother and son both were of that fast-vanishing class of folk who spell their _Education_ with the largest sort of capital letter. Their minds were alike, in that they both believed the work worth while, for the sake of all that it would be able to accomplish.

"Thank you, mother," Scott said unsteadily. "I am glad you feel so, even if I don't deserve it." Then he steadied sharply and became practical. "So far, we've put it through, one way or the other," he went on. "Still, if I go in for the ministry," and his mother winced at the bald worldliness of his phrasing; "I shall have a year and a half more at college, and then three years of divinity school. We can do it, I suppose. For a matter of fact, I ought to be able to put it through alone, without a cent from you; but is it quite worth while? According to Professor Mansfield, if I keep steady, I can go straight from my degree into the laboratory as a paid demonstrator. It wouldn't be much pay, of course. Still, it would help along, and I could go on studying under him, all the time I was about it. By the time three years were over, the three years I would have to spend in the divinity school, I should be, ought to be, well upon my feet and walking towards a future of my own."

His mother drew a long breath, as the swift torrent of words came to an end. Then,--

"And at the end of twenty years, my son? That is the real question."

Scott's enthusiasm all went out of him. His assent came heavily.

"Yes," he admitted. "Yes. I suppose that is the real question, mother. It all depends--"

She looked up at him sharply, as if in haste to probe the limits of his hesitation.

"Depends?" she echoed.

"Upon the way you feel about it, mother."

She shook her head.

"Not that," she offered swift correction; "but upon the question which is right. You are at the forking of the roads, the narrow and the broad. You are almost a man, Scott. I have no right to decide this for you; you must make your own choice for yourself. However, my son, you know my dreams for you; you know my prayers."

And Scott Brenton, boy as he was in years, bowed his head in grave assent, and then and there made his great renunciation. He did know his mother's dreams; he had overheard, albeit unknown to her, her prayer. She had given all she had for him; his young honour, taking no thought for disastrous consequences, demanded that he should give up at least this one thing for her. He pushed back his chair, went around the table and laid one hand upon her shoulder.

"I do know, mother dear. As far as I can, I will do my best to carry them all out."

He bent above her in a brief, awkward caress, the caress of a man whose life has been too hard and too narrow to give him opportunity to perfect himself in the arts of masculine endearments. Then, leaving his breakfast half uneaten, he went away upstairs and shut the door of his own room behind him. A long hour later, he came down the stairs again, and went away in search of Catie.

He hoped Catie would listen to him, and understand him and his crisis; but, all the time he hoped, he was conscious of a sneaking fear lest she would not. Scott loved to talk things out, and Catie, when she was not too busy otherwise, was a good listener. Nevertheless, her comprehensions were concrete and very, very finite.

CHAPTER TWO

To all seeming, there always had been a Catie in Scott Brenton's life, always had been a Catie for him to seek in seasons of domestic stress or discipline. Indeed, his first memory of her was inextricably mingled with the recollections of an early spanking. Scott was naturally a good child, and Mrs. Brenton, as a rule, spanked cunningly, but very seldom. Now and then, she felt that circumstances justified the deed.

Scott, seven years old and inventive withal, had been locked up in the house alone, one day, while his mother went to a particularly attractive funeral with carriages enough for even the outside circle of the mourners. One such mourner failing, she had been bidden to the vacant seat in the rearmost carriage, and her absence had been prolonged unduly. She came home, expecting to find Scott wailing loudly for his missing mother. Instead, she found him playing camp-out Indian, as he called it, with her best bed by way of wickiup, and the wickiup was provisioned lavishly and stickily from the resources of the closet where she kept her jams.

Prudence and frugality demanded that Mrs. Brenton should remove her best clothes, before she essayed to administer justice at short range. Scott, left to himself, played on contentedly the while, until his camp was rudely invaded by a foe clad in a second-best petticoat and a shoulder shawl, and armed with a slipper which had seen better days. Even then, prudence cried out for yet another delay, for the young Indian was carrying so much of his commissariat upon his person that it seemed wise to wash him, before she proceeded to the spanking. Mrs. Brenton's point of view, moreover, was decidedly old-fashioned. Instead of rejoicing at this fresh manifestation of her boy's imagination, she concentrated all her remarks upon what she termed his theft, and she frugally used the period while she was scrubbing him, to drive her spoken condemnations home. Accordingly, it was a long, long time of duplex agony before the spanking finally achieved itself, and Scott, clean, but tingling from the slipper's impact, was told to go out and sit down on the doorstep and think over what a bad, bad boy he had been.

Like Alexander the Less, he found the doorstep distinctly cooling to his fevered person, and he sat there contentedly enough, while he gave himself over to the luxury of bubbly sobs and of digging his fists into his weeping eyes. So absorbed was he in this soothing occupation that he paid no heed to the patter of approaching footsteps, until a voice fell on his ears.

"Cry-baby!" the voice chirped, in the high key which, to the youthful mind, is expressive of disdain. And then it added even more disdainfully, "Dirty-face!"

Dazed by this two-fold attack upon him, Scott took down his smudgy fists and displayed to the intruder's view his smudgy countenance. An older pair of eyes might easily have discovered cause for wonder that, in so short a time since his scrubbing, so great a quantity of mother earth could have found its way upward to mingle with his tears and form the dust that grimed his face. Despite his tears and his grime, however, Scott's manly temper roused itself to face his critic.

"I ain't!" he bellowed hotly at the air around him, without troubling himself to look to see whence the strange voice had come.

The voice reflected somewhat of his opposition.

"You are, too. What's on your face?"

"Blackberry jam and soap," Scott answered, with a craftiness beyond his years. He told the literal truth, but not all the truth. No need to inform this critical stranger what was the crust that lay on top of all.

The critical stranger removed her pink countenance from the crack between the front-fence pickets, and pushed the gate open just a very little way. Seen through the larger crack, she stood revealed to Scott, a slim little damsel of perhaps six years, her pink calico frock starched until it stood out stiffly above her knees, and her topmost curl tied up with a mammoth bow of green gauze ribbon, obviously culled from some box of ancestral finery. She was a pretty child; but, even at that tender age, the decision of her little mouth and chin was too pronounced, the lift of her small head a trifle too self-satisfied.

"What's the matter, cry-baby?" she inquired, as Scott's interest in her appearing was punctuated with a fresh gulp of woe.

"I've been spanked."

The critical light faded from her eyes, to be replaced by another light, this time of interest.

"What for?"

"I was playing Indian in mother's jam."

Most damsels of that age would have asked for further particulars. Instead,--

"Hh!" she sniffed, and the sniff spoke volumes as to the quality of her young imagination.

Scott felt it lay upon him to defend himself from all which the sniff implied.

"'Twas fun, too," he asserted suddenly, as, with a final wipe of his fist across his eyes, he dismissed the outward traces of his grief. "You get things to eat to take with you, and the bed's the camp, and you live there for years and always, all alone. And then they smell the things you're eating and--"

"Who's they?" the small girl demanded.

"Oh, wolves and Indians and things, and they come around and growl awfully. But you aren't afraid. You take your gun, and crawl in under the blankets and go on eating, sure they won't come in after you--"

"What do you eat?"

Had Scott been a few years older, he doubtless would have answered,--

"Pemmican."

As it was, however, he responded glibly,--

"Snake meat."

"Hh!" Again there came the sniff. "Snakes don't have meat. They only wiggle."

Scott glared at her, during a moment of speechless hostility. Then suddenly he fired upon her with what was to be the favourite weapon of his later life.

"Prove it!" he ordered her defiantly.

But his defiance fell upon a surface quite impenetrable to its shaft.

"Sha'n't!"

"'Fraid cat!" he retorted curtly.

"Ain't!"

And then, for a short while, there was a silence. Out of the corner of her eye, the little girl was watching Scott. Scott, his head ostentatiously averted, was gazing at something he had dug up out of his trouser pocket, something concealed within the curve of his smudgy hand. Young as he was, his theories did not fail him. The silence prolonged itself for minutes which seemed to them both like hours. Then the eternal feminine yielded to the sting of curiosity.

"What you got?" she asked him, as the gate swung open just a little wider.

Scott was too canny to yield one whit of his advantage. His hand shut into a fist.

"That's telling."

The gate swung open wider yet, and the small girl marched through the opening.

"Tell me," she said imperiously. "I want to see it."

Scott still held himself aloof, still held his trophy concealed from her curious eyes. She tried to grasp his hand, missed it, then succeeded. Then she tried to pry open the tight-shut fingers.

"Show me!" she ordered.

He shook his head, smiling derisively at her, while her strong little fingers did their best to pluck open his hard little fist.

Without another word, she bent above his hand. An instant later, the hand flew open, and the ball of the opening thumb showed the prints of small, sharp teeth.

"What is it?" she asked once more.

Scott's voice dropped to a murmur which was charged with mystery.

"It's a back tooth of the whale that swallowed Jonah."

Instantly she struck his hand a blow that sent his trophy flying off into the thick grass beside the step.

"It is not," she said shrilly. "It's nothing but a dirty old chicken bone, so there!"

And then, to the unspeakable astonishment of Scott, she seated herself upon the bottom step, smoothed her calico skirt across her little knees, and prepared to await further developments in tranquil comfort. It was thus that Scott Brenton first learned the lesson that the feminine mind only gains the fullest comfort in having the last word, when it is able to sit by and watch that word sink in and be digested. Later on in his life, the lesson was repeated again and again, with an increasing list of corollaries. Oddly enough, too, it was always given to him by the selfsame teacher, sometimes with mildness, sometimes with spiritual floggings.

This time, however, she appeared to be contented with the form her teaching had taken, contented, too, with its effect upon himself. Accordingly, she made no effort to continue the discussion. She merely sat there, silent, in the place whence she had ousted him, and gloated on her victory, sure that in time his masculine impatience would lead him to break in upon the pause.

She knew her man.

"What's your name?" Scott asked her curtly, after an interval of digging one heel and then the other into the turf beside the step.

"Catie."

"Catie what?"

"Catie Harrison."

"Huuh!"

She scented criticism in his reply.

"It's better than yours is," she retorted.

"It is not, too," he made counter retort. "Besides, you don't know my name."

Slowly the little damsel nodded, once, twice.

"Yes, I do. The man told me."

"What man?"

"The man that sells hens' eggs to my mother. I asked him, and he told me."

Scott eyed her with fierce hostility. Was there no limit to this small girl's all-penetrating curiosity?

"What is it, then?" he asked defiantly.

"It's Walter Scott Brenton," she assured him. And then she added, by way of turning her triumph into a crushing rout, "I think it's the homeliest name I ever heard."

And once again Scott Brenton gritted his teeth upon the fact that he was downed.

Later, he took his turn for extracting information concerning his uninvited guest. He extracted it from herself, however, and with refreshing directness. At the advanced age of seven years, one sees no especial use in conventional beatings about the bush. One goes straight to the point, or else one keeps still entirely; and, at that phase of his existence, keeping still was not Scott Brenton's forte. Indeed, he was later than are the most of us in learning the lesson that the keenest social weapon lies in reticence.

The starchy little damsel, it appeared, was the daughter of a petty farmer, lately come into the village. She was an only child; her home was the third house up the street, and her mother, busy about her household tasks and already a good deal under the thumb of her small daughter, considered her whole maternal duty done when the child was washed and curled and clothed in starch, and then turned out to play. Catie was able to look out for herself, Catie's mother explained contentedly to her new neighbours, and she knew enough to come home, when she was hungry. Best let her go her ways, then. She would learn to be a little woman, all the sooner; and, in the meantime, it was a great deal easier to do the housework without having a child under foot about the kitchen.

And go her ways the little damsel did, with only her guardian angel to see to it that her way was not the wrong one. By the time her father's first week's rent was due, Catie had made acquaintance with every inhabitant of the village, from the Methodist minister down to the blacksmith's bob-tailed cat. Not only that; but Catie, by dint of many questions, had discovered why the Methodist minister's wife was buried in the churchyard with a slice of marble set up on top of her, and why the blacksmith's bob-tailed cat lacked the major portion of her left ear. If ever there was a gossip in the making, it was Catie Harrison. More than that, her accumulated gossip was sorted out and held in reserve, ready to be applied to any end that suited her small convenience. Scott Brenton found that fact out to his cost, when the story of his camp and his subsequent spanking came back upon him by way of the man that sold the hens' eggs, in retaliation for his refusal to ask that he himself and Catie should be allowed to have a ride in the egg-man's wagon. Catie might be but six years and nine months old; but already her infant brain had fathomed the theory of effectual relation between the crime and the punishment. Her ideal Gehenna would be made up of countless little assorted hells, not of one vast and indiscriminate lake of flaming brimstone. Perchance this very fact had its own due share of influence upon the later theology of Scott Brenton.

That there would be influence, no one who watched the children could deny. After the first day's squabbles, perhaps even on account of them, they became inseparable. When they were not together, either Catie was looking for Scott, or Scott for Catie, save upon the too frequent occasions when discipline fell upon the two of them simultaneously and forced them into a temporary captivity. When they were held apart, they spent their time planning up new things to do together, once the parental ban was off their intercourse. When they were together, it was Scott who supplied the imagination for the pair of them. Catie's share lay in the crafty outworking of the plan. When their plans came to disaster, as often happened by reason of the boldness of Scott's young conceptions, Catie took the disappointment with the temper of a little vixen, kicked against the pricks and openly defied the Powers that Be. Scott, on the other hand, shut his teeth and accepted the penalty, already intent upon the question as to what he should undertake another time.

And so the days wore on. To the adult mind, they would have seemed to pass monotonously. The quicker child perceptions, though, the magnifying point of view that makes a mountain out of every mole hill, caused them to seem charged with an infinite amount of variety and incident, full of enthusiastic dreams and thrills, and of crushing disappointments which, however, never completely ended hope. Scott's heritage from the long line of Parson Wheelers would have made him stick to the belief that two and two must always equal four, had it not been for that other heritage which kept him always hoping that some day or other it might equal five. Already, he was starting on a life-long quest for that same five, and Catie, nothing loath, went questing by his side. Catie, though, went out of the merest curiosity, and her invariable "I told you so" added the final, the most poignant sting to all of Scott's worst disappointments. At the mature age of six or seven, Catie Harrison showed quite plainly that no mere longing for a possible ideal would ever lure her from the path of practical expediency. She walked slowly, steadily ahead, while her boy companion leaped to and fro about her, chasing first one bright butterfly of the imagination and then another, only to clutch them and bring them back to her to be viewed relentlessly with prosaic eyes which saw only the spots where his impatient touch had rubbed away the downy bloom.

And so the months rolled past them both, Catie the young materialist and potential tyrant, and Scott Brenton the idealist. The years carried the children out of the perpetual holidays of infancy and into the treadmill of schooling that begins with b, a, ba and sometimes never ends. Side by side, the two small youngsters entered the low doorway of the primary school; side by side, a few years later, a pair of lanky striplings, they were plodding through their intermediate studies which seemed to them unending. Catie was eagerly looking towards the final pages of her geography and grammar, for beyond them lay the entrance to another perpetual holiday, this time of budding maturity. Scott's eyes were also on the finish, but for a different reason. His mother, one night a week before his fourteenth birthday, had talked to him of college, of his grandfather, the final Parson Wheeler of the line, and, vaguely, of certain ambitions which had sprung up within her heart, the morning she had listened to the birth-cry of her baby boy.

A week later, she had given him his grandfather's great gold pen, albeit with plentiful instructions to the effect that he was not to use it, but to keep it in its box, untarnished, until such time as he was fitted to employ it in writing sermons of his own. Scott had received the gift with veneration, and then quite promptly had summoned Catie to do reverence at the selfsame shrine. But Catie had rebelled.

"Fudge!" she had said crisply. "What's the sense of having a useful thing like that, that you can't use?"

CHAPTER THREE

At the mature age of four, Scott Brenton's favourite pastime had been what he termed "playing Grandpa Wheeler." The game accomplished itself by means of a chair by way of pulpit, and a serried phalanx of other chairs by way of congregation, whom the young preacher harangued by the hour together. The harangues were punctuated by occasional bursts of song, not always of a churchly nature, and emphasized by gestures which were more forceful than devout. In this game Mrs. Brenton often joined him, lending her thin soprano voice to help out his quavering childish notes, and doing her conscientious best, the while, to keep the songs attuned to the key of proper piety. To be sure, she did insist upon bringing her sewing into church and, on one occasion, she patched her young son's trousers into a hideous pucker, by reason of her greater interest in the method of his expoundings.

"Just for all the world like father!" she was wont to say. "But wherever did he pick it up, when father was in his grave, three years before the child was born?"

The question was left unanswered by herself of whom she asked it. All too soon, moreover, it was joined by another question of similar import, but far more appalling. Indeed, where did the boy, where does any boy, pick up the tricks and manners and the phraseology of certain of his forbears who quitted the world before he fairly entered it? In Scott's case, the example was a flagrant one.

At the starting of the game of "Grandpa Wheeler," Mrs. Brenton had been so charmed with the outworkings of heredity as to balk at nothing Scott might do: sermon, hymn, or even prayer. When she was sure of her rôle and had the leisure, she joined him in his imitative worship, delighting in the unconscious fashion in which the sonorous phrases of convention rolled off from her son's baby lips. And then, one day, Scott's memory failed him in his invocation. There came a familiar phrase or two, and then a babble of meaningless syllables, ending in a long-drawn and relieved Amen. An instant later, Scott lifted up his head.

"Mo--ther," he shrilled vaingloriously; "I forgetted how it ought to go; but didn't I put up a bully bluff?"

And, in consequence, Mrs. Brenton took her prayers into bed with her, that night. Some of them, even, lasted till the dawn.

This was when Scott was only four. By the time he was fourteen, he took himself more seriously. He still played "Grandpa Wheeler" in imagination; but he no longer called it play, but plans. Already, he was looking forward to the hour when, in creaking Sunday shoes and shiny Sunday broadcloth, he should mount the stairs of the old-fashioned pulpit in the village church, gather the hearts of the waiting congregation within the welcoming and graceful gesture which would prelude his opening prayer, and then scourge those same hearts with the lashing truths which lead unto regeneration. He saw himself distinctly in this rôle, more distinctly, even, than in the blurry mirror before which he performed his morning toilet. It was no especial wonder that he did so. Ever since he had been old enough to pay heed to anything, his mother had been holding the picture up before his eyes.

Catie, however, refused to be impressed by the picture.

"What makes you want to be a minister?" she asked him. "I'd rather you kept a store. There's lots more money in it."

"I don't see what difference it is going to make to you?" Scott answered rather cavalierly.

Catie's reply was matter-of-fact, regardless of the sentimental nature of its substance.

"Don't be stupid, Scott. Of course, we shall be married, when we get grown up, and then you'll have me to support."

It was the first time she had announced this rather radical plan of hers, so it was no especial wonder that, for the moment, it took Scott's breath away. Not that he objected especially, however. It was only the novelty of the idea that staggered him. To his slowly-developing masculine mind, it never had occurred that he and Catie could not go on for ever, just chums and playmates and, now and then, lusty foes, without complicating their relations by more formal, final ties. He rallied swiftly, however.

"Well, you'll have to marry a minister, then," he told her sturdily.

Her nose wrinkled in disgust.

"And wear shabby clothes and a bad bonnet, like Mrs. Platt, and have to go to all the funerals in town! How horrid! Oh, Scott, do be some other kind of a man. A minister's wife can't dance anything but the Virginia reel, nor play anything more than muggins. Why can't you be a dentist, if you won't keep a store?"

For the once, Scott showed himself dominant, aggressive.

"Because I'd rather preach. It's what all my people have always done."

Then Catie made her blunder.

"What about your father?" she asked, and her voice was taunting.

Scott forgot his holy heritage and turned upon her swiftly.

"Shut up!" he bade her curtly, and her cheek tingled under the blow he dealt her.

It was the first time in his life that Scott had turned upon her with decision. Moreover, perchance it would have been better for him, had it not been the last.

For three days afterward, the subject was as a sealed book between them. Then Catie broke the seals, and gingerly.

"I have been thinking about your being a minister," she told him, as she dropped into step beside him, on the way to school. "Of course, you were very rude to treat me the way you did, the other day; and I hope you are sorry."

Scott shut his teeth, although he nodded shortly. He had not enjoyed the three-day frost between himself and Catie; but he was sure that, in the final end, he had been in the right of it, even if he had been a little unceremonious in pressing the matter home on her attention. Moreover, his will had triumphed; Catie had been the one, not he, to break the silence. The casualness of her "Hullo!" that morning, had not deceived him in the least. He was perfectly well aware that she had lain in wait for his passing, her eye glued to the crack of the front-window curtains. The victory was his. He could afford to yield the minor point concerning manners, when he stood so firmly entrenched upon that other point which concerned the ministry.

"Of course," he conceded guardedly; "I know I was beastly when I hit a girl."

"Yes." Catie's accent was uncompromising. "It was a disgrace to you. I wonder you can look me in the face. If it had been any other boy, I never would have spoken to him again as long as I lived."

"Really?" To her extreme disgust, Scott seemed to take her utterances merely as matter for scientific investigation.

"Of course not," she said impatiently.

"But why?" he asked her.

"Why?" she flashed. "Because he wouldn't deserve to be spoken to, nor even looked at."

"No; I don't mean that," the boy answered, still with the same apparent desire to probe the situation to the very bottom. "But why should you speak to me, and not to him?"

She suspected him of fishing for a sweetie, and, out of sheer contrariety, she flung him a bit of crust.

"Because I am used to you, I suppose. One gets so, after eight or nine years of growing up together." And, in that one sentence, Catie showed the practical maturity of her grasp on life and on Scott Brenton.

Half way to the distant schoolhouse, she spoke again, this time more tactfully.

"Never mind the spat, Scott. That's over and done with, even if you were horrid," she told him. "But really, now we're growing up, we ought to think things over and decide things." And, despite her short frocks and her childish face, her words held a curious accent of mature decision.

"What sort of things?"

"The things you are going to do, when you grow up."

"I have decided, I tell you," he said stubbornly.

"To be a country parson, all your days?" she queried flippantly.

"To be a minister, yes. Not a country one, though."

"Oh." She pondered. "What then?"

He looked over her head, not so much in disdain as in search of a more distant vista.

"In a city church, of course, a great stone church with towers and chimes and arches, and crowded full of people, and with their horses and carriages waiting at the doors," he answered, he who had never trodden a paved street in all his life.

"Oh!" But, this time, the monosyllable was breathy, and not sharp.

"Yes, and there will be a choir as good as those people who sang at the town hall, last Thanksgiving, and flowers, lots of them, roses in winter, even," he went on eagerly. "And you can hear a pin drop while I am preaching, only once in a while somebody will sob a little in the pauses, and then put in a roll of hundred-dollar bills when the contribution box comes round."

Catie drew another long breath, and her eyes sparkled.

"Lovely!" she said, and she stretched out the word to its full length by way of expressing her contentment. "And where'll I be?"

Scott withdrew his eyes from distant space and gazed upon her blankly.

"I hadn't thought about that," he said.

Then, for an instant, the glory of his dream was shattered.

"Pig!" Catie said concisely.

However, it was not within the limits of her curiosity to drop the prediction at this piquant point. The framing of the picture, for so she regarded it, had pleased her. Scott failing, she must fill in the portrait to suit herself.

"I'll tell you, then. I shall be there, in the very front seat, dressed in flowing curls," Catie's hair, at this epoch, was pokery in its stiff straightness; "and a real lace dress. And, after service, all the rich people in the church will ask us out to dinner. Of course, in a church like that, the minister's wife is always at the top of things, and I shall help along your work by making people like me and be willing to listen to your sermons because you are my husband."

And then the two young egotists fell silent, each one of them lost in outlining a future in which he himself was the central point, the guiding principle of all things. Between the two of them, however, there was this one essential difference: Scott's forecastings were vague and rosy dreams, Catie's were concrete plans.

None the less and despite that difference, from that time onward, it was tacitly agreed between the children that Scott would one day be a minister, with Catie for his wife. To be sure, it was Catie herself who supplied the latter clause, not Scott.

"You'll have to have some sort of a wife," she argued superbly. "Ministers always do. It might as well be me. You like me better than any of the other girls, and I am used to having you around." And, upon this rocky basis of practicality, their young romance was built.

Mrs. Brenton, meanwhile, looked on them with contented eyes, smiling a little now and then at the downright fashion in which the thirteen-year-old Catie made known her matrimonial plans. Mrs. Brenton liked Catie well enough, but not too well. She could have dreamed of another sort of wife for her boy, for Catie's crudeness occasionally irritated her, Catie's self-centred ambition, her intervals of density sometimes came upon Mrs. Brenton's nerves. However, girls were scarce upon the horizon of the Brentons. Catie was not perfect; but, at least, she might be infinitely worse. And Scott would be sure to need a practical wife, to counteract his habitual disregard of concrete things. Catie would see to it that his wristbands were not frayed and that his buttons were in their proper places. She might not enter into his ideals, but she would mend his socks and insist upon his changing them when he had wet his feet. Socks were more important to a man than mere ideals, any day, more important, that is, as concerned his conjugal relations. Scott could make up his ideals to suit himself. His socks must be prepared for him by wifely hands.

Of course, they were only children now, only little children, too young to be thinking about such things as marriage. And yet--And Mrs. Brenton shook her head. And yet, were not the happiest marriages prearranged in just this way? Surely, this was far better as a preparation for wedded life than was the sudden, feverish courtship which rushed at express-train speed and clatter from the first introduction of two strangers to the final irrevocable words before the altar. Mrs. Brenton's own experience had taught her that acquaintance should come before one's marriage, not wait till after.

All in all, the more she thought about it, Mrs. Brenton favoured Catie's somewhat premature announcement of her plans. Despite his heritage of sturdy parson blood, Mrs. Brenton confessed to herself that Scott might easily become a little erratic now and then, might let go his hold upon the one thing needful in order to gratify his curiosity concerning the touch of less essential, more alluring trifles. He needed the steady, sturdy influence of some one outside himself to keep him always in the beaten tracks. Already, for better or for worse, Catie's influence upon him was a strong one; stronger, Mrs. Brenton admitted to herself with a woful little sigh, than that of his own mother, despite the ill-concealed anxiety and the doting love that only a mother can give, and then only to an only son. Between the two of them, herself and Catie, Catie's will was the stronger law. Catie, if she chose, could keep Scott's feet well in the limits of the beaten trails. It should be her duty to impress on Catie's girlish mind that the beaten trail was the only one for him to follow, the path of expediency as well as the path of holiness; that complete contentment and success lay only at its other end.

Accordingly, Mrs. Brenton took it upon her shoulders to play the part of Providence for those two young children: Scott and Catie. To Scott, she pointed out Catie as the girl best worth his attention and his comradeship, the while, with the other hand, she still held up before him the picture she had so long ago created, the picture of himself, child of the preaching race of Wheelers, proclaiming the gospel to all men and some heathen. Side by side she placed them: the world-given wife, the heaven-offered career. Moreover, she was so far the artist that she was able to shift her lights and shades to fall now upon the one and now upon the other, according as Scott's interest in one or other of them appeared to her to wane. Her quick-sighted mother love was prompt to warn her of that waning, prompt to make her understand that, to a boy like Scott, a hard and fast monotony would be fatal to almost any plan.

With Catie, on the other hand, her course was altogether different, altogether simpler. With the constant and unwavering blows of a carpenter pounding a nail into an oaken plank, she pounded into Catie's mind the undeniable truths that Scott's ancestry alone was enough to fit him for the ministry; that the ministry, granted the sincerity of its orthodox convictions, may be the highest field of labour offered to any man. Moreover, to these palpable truths, she added others, a shade less undeniable. She impressed it on the mind of Catie that Scott's sole chance of happiness, in this life and the life to come, rested upon their combined ability to shield him from any adverse influence which might deflect his footsteps from his predestined goal. She impressed it on the mind of Catie, also, that it was her girlish duty to herd her immature companion into the proper fold; that her young and sprightly charms, her girlish loyalty should be to her as a shepherd's crook, the guiding wand to be applied in moments of extremest peril.

After her lights, Mrs. Brenton was canny. If she only had been a little bit more worldly, she would have been a clever woman; moreover, her potential cleverness had never been one half so manifest as when she talked about all this to Catie. She did not put forward her urgings crudely, as for the sake of Scott, her son. Rather than that, she held them up to Catie coyly, as glimpses of opportunity and power which waited for her at the gateway of maturity: opportunity given only to the helpmeet of a man in the commanding position offered by his ministerial profession, power given to that helpmeet by reason of her position by his side.

Like the conductor of an orchestra who draws out from one instrument and then another the varied themes of an overture, so Mrs. Brenton drew from the unlike minds of Catie and her son the selfsame and successive themes of what she, in her mother blindness, deemed the one possible and ennobling overture to Scott Brenton's life. It was quite characteristic of Mrs. Brenton's make-up, however, that she took no thought of Catie's life, save in so far as it could be applied to the ultimate development of Scott, her son.

CHAPTER FOUR

"A puffic' fibbous!" the monthly nurse had announced triumphantly, when she had presented Mrs. Opdyke's first-born son to his mother for her inspection.

The phrase, and the smile which invariably accompanied it, were the main stock in trade of the monthly nurse. Upon these two items, she had based her popularity which now had endured for more than a dozen years of escorting over the threshold of this world the sons and daughters of "first families only," as her professional card insisted. To be sure, the constant employment of the phrase had robbed it of all critical significance. Indeed, it is very doubtful whether, even at the start of her career, the nurse had ever linked it in her mind with the great god Apollo. From some one of her predecessors, she had picked it up and found that it fitted well upon her tongue. Later, the "fibbouses" abounded more and more plenteously, as her clientage increased, and she applied the term indiscriminately, regardless whether the recipient were an Apollo, or a mere Diana.

However, from the start, Reed Opdyke certainly deserved the phrase. Long generations of clean, high-minded living cannot fail to produce an effect upon their offspring. Reed's father had branched off from a line of lawyers to hold the chair of chemistry in one of the great colleges for girls. Reed's mother was of Pilgrim stock, well-nigh untainted by the blood of later, lesser arrivals on the Massachusetts shore. On either side of the house, it had been a matter of simple creed to hold one's body and one's mind equally aloof from possibilities of disease. Reed Opdyke's make-up showed the value of this creed.

Not that he thought very much about it, however. He accepted as a matter of course his sanity, very much as he accepted most other things that came in his way. His loosely curled fists within his pockets, his head erect and his lips smiling, he went striding along through life, taking the best of it as his natural right, and letting the rest of it alone. From kindergarten into school and from school into college, the old, old road trodden by all his ancestors, he journeyed quite as a matter of course. In fact, it never struck him that any fellow could do otherwise; never, that is, until he met Scott Brenton.

For Scott, in time, had also come to college. His mother had insisted upon that; had worked for it that it might in time be possible; had scrimped and toiled and saved, the while she had been training her only child to a strict economy which, however galling, he must accept as well worth the while for the sake of all that it was going to put within his grasp. Accordingly, Scott had been sent to school throughout the termtimes, sent well or ill, in good days and in bad. He had been goaded into an ambition which held him at the top of his small classes in the village school. When the top of the top class was reached, and college was still inaccessible, Mrs. Brenton had stiffened her sinews for yet greater toil and scrimping, and had sent her son up to Andover where the Wheeler name was a tradition, where the knowledge of Scott's ancestry would help him to find the employment that he needed. Scott's education was to be by no means easy of achievement. To gain his school diploma and his later degrees at college, he too must work, not alone at books, but, in his off-hours, at any task that offered.

And Scott did work, too. Around him, other boys were going in for football, making records on the track team, getting occasional leaves to run in to Boston for an odd half-holiday. Then they came back, hilarious and triumphant, to discuss their experience at mealtimes, boasting, chaffing, wrangling merrily in the intimacy known to boyhood, the world over. They never thought to pay any especial attention to the other boy who brought them things to eat, a boy with luminous gray eyes and clothes which were in sore need of pressing. He was just "that waiter chap" and not a human being like themselves. They talked about their secret plans before him, with no more thought of his personality than as if he had been a concrete post. And, after listening to their chatter throughout a protracted mealtime, after seeing, as he could not fail to do, how he counted to them for absolutely nothing at all, Scott Brenton had his hours when he too doubted the fact of his own humanity. An active brain and an almost automatic body trained to supple service: these by themselves, he realized, do not go far towards making a human thing of life. Contacts are necessary for that, not total isolation; and contact was the one thing denied him. Now and then he had his hours of wishing that those other boys, boys whose talk was full of reference to unfamiliar ways of life: of wishing that they would treat him a little bit unkindly. Anything would be better than this absolute ignoring of his individuality.

In his intervals of waiting on the table, he washed up the dishes. His meals he took, standing by the sink, a plate on the shelf before him, while he washed and chewed simultaneously. There were other tasks besides, tasks all of them more or less menial, all of them adding to the general drain upon his nerves and body. The rest of the time, his studies kept him busy. Indeed, it was no small wonder that he was able to maintain a decent footing in his class, so fagged out and weary was he by the time he had a moment's leisure to prepare his next-day's lessons. But prepare them he did, and well, although his eyes grew heavy over the task and ached with the strain of working by the one dim light with which his shabby garret room was equipped. It was a single room, unhappily. Even there, all contact was denied him. Saint Simon, sitting alone upon his pillar and gazing down upon his fellow men, was no more solitary than was Scott Brenton. Moreover, Saint Simon had the final consolation of being quite aware that he was looking down, a consolation which, to Scott Brenton, was permanently refused.

And then, Andover done, there came college, not one of the small colleges where individual idiosyncrasies count so much in making up the estimate of the student's character; but a great university, so great that it can stop to measure no man by any one trait or any several traits, so busy that it must grasp him in the round, or not at all. There lay the fact of Scott Brenton's ultimate salvation. He would have been downed completely, judged by the finical standards of the little college.

It was in his choice of college that, for the first time in his life, Scott Brenton's will had become dominant. His mother would fain have had it otherwise. The Wheelers, one and all, had been little-college men. The tradition was in their blood, and she had inherited it to the full: the strange belief that the smaller college offers less temptation to go astray; the equally strange belief that the closer contact with a few professors can quite atone for the lack of friction against a great crowd of fellow students, alien to one another in habits of mind and body, yet all of them, swiftly or sluggishly as may be, moving towards the selfsame goal. It had seemed to Mrs. Brenton something bordering on the blasphemous when Scott had endeavoured to put this latter phase of the question before her. Realizing his own futility upon that score, he finally had changed his tactics and assured her that, as far as money-earning work went, there were ten chances in the great college to one in the small.

And Scott was right, albeit his argument was wholly superficial. The truth of the matter was that his Andover experience had left him sore and downhearted; that he knew, in the bottom of his boyish soul, that he must plunge beyond his depth and swim into a wider sea, or else go down entirely, pushed out of sight beneath the overlapping circles of the little cliques, all too self-centred to admit of any common focus.

Mrs. Brenton did not care at all about any common focus. The phrase "college spirit" sounded intemperate, and she would have been the last person in the world to agree to the belief that Scott could gain any education from contact with boys of his own age. To her mind, one fusty old professor out-valued one hundred eager undergraduates, as source of inspiration to the young. Education, to her mind, lay in the desk-end of the classroom; it was unthinkable to her that Scott had lost the best of Andover, by reason of his solitary life there. As for college, the students, all but Scott, were bound to be full of the wiles of the devil. Scott's safety lay in his books, and in his keeping too busy in his off-hours to have time to get into mischief.

Moreover, the purely practical end of the keeping busy was beginning to loom large upon Mrs. Brenton's horizon. More and more she was coming to realize that it is no small undertaking for any widow with an almost imperceptible income to put a son through college. Valiantly she toiled and scrimped; but it was becoming increasingly necessary for Scott to help her out in both the toiling and the scrimping. Accordingly, the creases deepened, both vertically about the corners of Scott's lips and horizontally across his shiny knees and shoulder blades. His eyes, though, grew more luminous, as time went on, perhaps because they were surrounded by ever deepening hollows.

It was those eyes that first caught the attention of Reed Opdyke. Midway in his sophomore year, Opdyke, with a dozen others of his kind, had revolted from the monotony of the commons table, and had set up a so-called joint of their own, an eating-club presided over by a gaunt and self-helping senior, and served by a quartette of cadaverous and self-helping sophomores among whom was Scott Brenton.

Reed Opdyke was a busy youngster, full of the countless interests that cram the college days of a popular, easy-going student. Also he was a potential leader of men, who gave himself leisure to study the people with whom he came into any kind of contact, to sort them out and classify them according to their possibilities as they unveiled themselves to his boyish eyes. Three of the cadaverous sophomores he dismissed with a glance. They were impossible. They lacked all spiritual yeast and, to the end of time, they would be waiters in one sense or another. Scott Brenton was different. A fellow with those eyes must have it in him to count for something, some day. Lounging in his seat at table, Opdyke kept his eye on Scott, talked at him, then talked to him; and then, obedient to some boyish whim or other, a few days later, the meal ended, he took him by the elbow and walked him off to Mory's for a second supper.

Mrs. Brenton, on her knees beside her bed, that night, prayed long and fervently and with full particulars concerning the education of her son. Her heart would have frozen with horror, had she seen the smoke-filled room where her son was sitting, with Reed Opdyke across the table from him. Her hopes for his future would have shrivelled into naught, could she have realized that, over that very table, her son, her Scott, was to receive a lesson, new and quite unforgettable. One hour of jovial human comradeship had opened Scott Brenton's eyes to more things than he ever yet had dreamed of. It had taught him once for all that irresponsible, carefree youth is not, of necessity, vicious.

As the days and the weeks ran on, the comradeship increased. Measured by the days of Opdyke, overflowing full of interests, it took the smallest possible share of time: a look of comprehension, a word of casual greeting, and, on rare occasions, a bit of a walk together when their ways chanced to coincide. Still more occasionally, a stray hour was spent at Mory's, or in Opdyke's room in Lawrence. As yet, a boyish delicacy had kept Opdyke from seeking to invade what he knew could not fail to be the barrenness of Scott Brenton's quarters.

Slight as was their intercourse, viewed in Opdyke's eyes, to Scott it filled the whole horizon, the one near and vital fact which broke in upon its emptiness and cut away the barren wastes about him. He lived alternately upon the memory of Opdyke as he had seen him last, and upon the anticipations of their next meeting. His hours of table service, ceasing to be wearisome, had become veritable social functions, for was there not always the chance of a random word and smile? Those failing, there was always the pleasure of watching Opdyke, now lounging lazily in his seat and mocking at his fellows, now bending forward above the table, heedless of his cooling plate, the while he harangued his companions with a facility which seemed to Scott the acme of brilliant eloquence.

At Reed's elbow, Scott followed each inflection of the persuasive voice, his lean face glowing with appreciation at every point his idol scored. For the time being, awkwardness was lost and all self-consciousness. Why think about himself, when he could have the chance to watch Reed Opdyke and to listen to him? Scott's nature thrilled in answer to the alien touch, unconsciously as that touch was given. It never once would have struck Opdyke that he was becoming an object of idolatry to this gaunt starveling to whom, as he expressed it, he had tried to be a little decent. It was quite within the limits of his comprehension that he could step down now and then to Scott. It never would have occurred to him, at that epoch of his experience, that Scott could try to clamber up to him. Save for the minutes when he consciously gave his attention to the ungainly young waiter, he disregarded him completely.

The other boys, however, were quick to take in the situation and to comment on it. "Reed's parson" they called Scott, and they chaffed Opdyke mercilessly, when Scott's back was turned. Scott, had he heard the chaff, would have been wounded to the death, a death he would have met far, far inside his shell, regretful that ever he had come out of it. Opdyke, however, merely laughed and stuck to his original position.

"A fellow with such eyes is bound to have it in him. He's never had a chance," he said to his chaffing mates. "Wait till he finds himself, and then see what happens."

"Nothing," came the prompt reply. "He won't ever find himself, Reed. He has found you, and that's as much as such a fellow as he is, can ever assimilate."

And the reply was by no means wide of the mark. For the present, Scott Brenton was finding it all he could do to assimilate Reed Opdyke. Indeed, it was only in the very end of all things that fulness of assimilation came.

As the time went on, partly in defiance of the chaffing of his chronies, partly on account of it, Opdyke lent himself more and more to the assimilating process. He sought out Scott more often, had him in his room, taught him to fill a pipe and smoke it after the fashion of a gentleman, dropped into his ears specious hints regarding manners, and about the efficiency of one's mattress as frugal substitute for a tailor's pressboard. To be sure, upon that latter count Scott took him with unforeseen literalness; and, in his zeal to carry out his teacher's dictum, subjected his coat to the mattress treatment, as well as his more simply-outlined nether garments. Moreover, it should be set down as distinctly to Opdyke's credit that he suppressed his merriment, the next time he saw the coat upon Scott Brenton's shoulders.

Just at this epoch, some waggish member of the eating club employed his camera at their expense. The resultant film, in after weeks, became one of the most popular assets of the class. True, the needful haste had caused the camera to tip a little. None the less, what the picture lacked in composition, it made up in clearness and in vitality. Taken solely as a study of contrasting types, it was of no small sociological value, since it proved past all gainsaying that the absolute democracy of a great college can bring into close relationship the most impossibly divergent natures.

Scott, at this time, was thin and lean. His shoulders were bowed a little with the strain of unceasing work and worry; in his more self-conscious moments, he shambled when he walked. Only moderately tall, clothed in ill-cut garments which he wore as uneasily as possible, his immature young figure was not one to call out much admiration on the score of its virility. Indeed, the one really virile thing about Scott Brenton was his hair, which sprang out strongly from his scalp, fine, but thick and just a little wavy where it lay across his crown. His head was well-shaped, only that it was a bit too high above the ears, the brow a bit too salient; the eyes alone, though, at that time, redeemed from hopeless mediocrity his worn, ill-nourished face. Beside his hips, his hands dangled limply, showing a stretch of unclothed wrist sticking out below the shrunken coat sleeves.

Beside him in the picture, Reed Opdyke strode lightly, still, to all seeming, the "puffic' fibbous" that his nurse had dubbed him. Six feet tall, lean and supple as a deerhound and as totally unconscious of his long, slim body, it was impossible to fancy him as ever being betrayed into an awkward motion. Above his straight, slim shoulders, his curly brown head rose proudly, his thin lips smiled a greeting to all the world around him, his brown eyes looked straight and true into the eyes of every man he chanced to meet. Only his sense of humour and his comfortable smattering of original sin could have saved Reed Opdyke from being insupportable. Beauty like his, albeit manly, is bound to be a certain handicap.

CHAPTER FIVE

It was to Reed Opdyke's influence that Scott owed the encouraging plaudits of his chemistry professor.

In an elective system which, at that time, was still left quite unmodified, Scott had happened upon the chemistry class by way of filling up his courses for his sophomore year. He had been going on with it indifferently for some months, when Opdyke had been transferred to his division. Up to that time, Scott had liked the class but temperately; that is, although it had seemed to him a useless frill upon the garment of his education, he did not dislike it in the least, and he had made a fair showing in his recitations.

Opdyke's coming into his division had changed all that. At first, Scott merely had been possessed by a fury of desire to shine before his idol's eyes. A little later on, Opdyke's manifest, albeit rather casual, interest in the subject had led Scott to revise his earlier notions carefully, to decide that there might be something in it, after all. By the beginning of his junior year, Scott had won the tardy attention of the head of the department. By the beginning of the Christmas holidays of that junior year, the head of the department had felt it his plain duty to explain to Scott that the road ahead of him was likely to be an open one and easy. If he kept on as he had begun, in time he might be head of a department on his own account. Absurd for a fellow with a mind like his to be spending his time over rhetoric and the classics! Science was his line, pure science; above all, chemistry.

And Scott had listened in silence, at first too much astounded by the unexpected verdict to make answer. Then, as the head of the department left off predicting and fell to making plans, Scott plucked up courage to tell of the ministerial career supposedly ahead of him. The professor, downright and enthusiastic in his utterances, pooh-poohed the entire ministerial idea. Nonsense! Absurd! Spoil a chemist to make a parson! Preposterous! Any one could preach, if he tried. Not one man in a dozen could even make a quantitative analysis tally up, and get anywhere near as much material out of it as went in. Waste on flourishing gestures those lithe hands that were so obviously created for the manipulation of such delicate things as balances and test-tubes and the like! It was impossible. Scott must take the other idea home with him and think it over carefully, during the coming holidays.

And Scott did take the idea home with him; but, from the first, he found it out of the question to think it over carefully. How could he, when, within himself, he knew that his feeling for the profession laid down before him by ancestral tradition and by his mother's constant urgings: that his feeling for the ministry was a perfunctory affection, a wholly different matter from the passionate desire that throbbed within him at the thought of giving up his life to scientific study. To preach ancient beliefs that no human power could verify, or to work on steadily, helping to broaden the field of truth, and proving all things as he went along: these were the alternatives. Obviously there could be no comparison between them.

Scott took the idea home with him, as Professor Mansfield had advised him. All those first days at home, he hugged the idea tight, tight, caressed it, gloated over it in secret, but allowed no one, not even Catie, to share it with him. Before he went back again to college, he would show it to his mother, would allow her to share his ecstasy at the new opportunity opened out before him. Not yet, however. For the first time in all his life, Scott Brenton was seriously in love. He gave to this new vision a fervent passion such as Catie had been powerless to arouse; like all young lovers, he desired a little time to revel in secret over the mere fact that he knew he was in love.

Of his mother's consent to the change of plan, Scott Brenton felt no doubt. Little by little, with his growth towards manhood, Scott had come to dominate his mother more than either of them realized. His very repression, his subordination in all his other relationships, helped towards this end. It was but a natural reaction from his servile position when away from home that, once more at home, he should assert himself as potential master of the house. His virile will was dormant, crushed, but it was by no means dead. And his mother, adoring him and idealizing him despite her maternal qualms on his account, yielded herself readily enough to his domination. And then, all at once, her yielding came to a sudden end against the bed rock of her character. Her own ambition, Scott's ultimate salvation, alike forbade him to renounce his ministerial career.

After all, though, it was one of the pitched battles that settle themselves without the final appeal to arms. On that winter night when Scott had come in, buoyantly alive and hopeful, to be met upon the threshold by his mother's prayer, the boy had realized that the fight was on. Next morning, over the plate of sausages, the crisis came, and went. Contrary to all his expectations, Scott left the table vanquished, his light of hope gone out for ever. It was a meagre consolation that, in thinking back upon the matter afterwards, he could take to himself the credit of having spoken no word which could ever fester in his mother's mind.

He had gone up to his room to lock the door and then to stand long at the window, staring with unseeing eyes down into the village street. By good rights, he should have seen one future, if not the other, opening out before him in ever-widening vistas. At nineteen or so, however, one is not too imaginative. Scott merely saw a vagrant dog trying to paw his way through a deep drift that lay across the road. He had a fellow feeling for the dog, when he gave up his effort and, sitting down in the ruins of his tunnel, abandoned himself to the contemplation of a flea.

After a while, he gave up his moody drumming on the pane, turned his back to the bleak perspective and, seizing his hat, departed in search of Catie. He found Catie mending a tear in the new frock she had worn, the night before, and unsympathetic in proportion to her discontent. The hollowness of the world was all about him, when he went back to college, three days later.

His first intention had been to throw over all his scientific study once for all. Forbidden the whole loaf, why whet his appetite by nibbling at the one slice offered him? His common sense, however, aided by the urging of Professor Mansfield, restored him to his reason. Scott had lost no time at all in making a clean breast of the matter to Professor Mansfield: his mother's dreams for him, her prejudices, his own choice and his renouncing of it all for the sake of what his mother had already given up for him. To his colleagues, the old professor expressed himself with plain profanity. To Scott, he took a gentler tone, spoke with appreciation of a mother such as Mrs. Brenton must be, spoke of the ministerial profession with an admiration he was far from feeling, and then craftily suggested to his favourite student that the preaching of the gospel should go hand in hand with scientific truth. In these modern days, a clergyman should be fully abreast of scientific thought. Best keep on with his chemistry. It might be useful to him, later on. Even eternal brimstone was susceptible of analysis.

Then, an instant later, the old professor could have bitten out his tongue for his unholy jest. His penitence was in no wise lessened by the quality of Scott's answering laugh. Best leave those fellows to their ministerial sackcloth, without questioning the quality of the flax from which it was spun. A man of Scott Brenton's calibre would do no harm by his preaching. What was the sense of seeking to upset any orthodox beliefs he might happen to have inherited? Besides, as long as Scott kept up his sciences, he was reasonably sure of keeping up his common sense and, what was a long way more important, his perspective and his sense of fun.

Despite his disappointed resolutions to dismiss the boy from his mind, the old professor, going his chemical way, worried about Scott. It seemed to him, according to his bald phrasing, to be a cruel waste of good material to make a parson out of what might have been a great explorer, for, to Professor Mansfield's mind, the incomplete and lengthening list of elements was just as reasonable a field for exploration as was the Antarctic Continent, or Darkest Africa. The results, indeed, of such exploration were bound to be a great deal the more useful. The professor worried. In time, he laid his worries on the dinner table before Reed Opdyke whose father had been a classmate of his own.

"It's an awful shame about young Brenton," he observed, when he and Opdyke and the tobacco had been left to themselves.

"What about him?" Opdyke questioned carelessly, as he picked up a match.

"That he has talents of his own, and a conscience that belongs to his mother. I believe in mothers, Reed; yours is a wonderful woman. But, in this case, I doubt the wonder, and I deplore the way she keeps her thumb on Brenton."

"You think she does?"

"I know it. Her confounded theories of sanctity are putting a binding around all his brain, a tight binding that is going to shrink and cause a pucker. Brenton has a first-class scientific mind, granted it gets the training. Left to himself and the divinity school, he'll turn into a perfect ass as preacher."

Opdyke shook his head.

"Nothing so possible as that, I'm afraid," he contradicted. "He'll just settle down on his heels, and shuffle along in----" He hesitated for a finish of his phrase.

The professor supplied it, and ruthlessly.

"Mental carpet slippers. Precisely. And I could give him boots and spurs."

"Why don't you do it, then?" Opdyke asked him bluntly.

In the interest of the subject, the old professor forgot that he was talking to one of his students and about another.

"Because he's got the very devil of a conscience, and won't let me. There is a widowed mother in the background, and a perfect retinue of preaching ancestors, whole dozens of them and all Baptists, and they have conspired to poison the boy's mind with the notion that it's up to him to preach, too. It would be all right, if he had anything to say; but he hasn't. He's tongue-tied and unmagnetic at the best; what's more, he has learned too many things to let him flaunt abroad the old beliefs as battle standards. He's gone too far, and not far enough. His life is bound to be a miserable sort of compromise, a species of battledore and shuttlecock arrangement between the limits of the deep sea and the devil." And then the professor pulled himself up short. "Know him?" he queried curtly, as he lit his match.

Opdyke nodded.

"As one does know people one never meets out anywhere," he said.

"What do you mean by that?" The question was still curt.

"He waits at my joint."

"Of course. And?"

Opdyke laughed.

"How do you know there is an _and_, Professor?" he asked easily.

"Because I know you, and because I've heard of 'Reed's parson.' You're your father's own son, Reed. You never could get a starveling like Scott Brenton out of sight of your conscience. How much have you seen of him?"

"Not much." And Opdyke gave a few details.

The professor nodded thoughtfully. Then,--

"See more," he ordered; "any amount more. You have time enough, you lazy young sinner, and I'll be answerable for all the consequences."

Opdyke yielded to his curiosity.

"What kind of consequences?"

"The inevitable kind that follow all you youngsters. Listen, boy. Brenton is a mixture of genius, and prig, and ignorant young hermit; or, rather, he has the elements all inside him, ready to be mixed. You'll have to do the mixing."

"I?" Opdyke looked startled. "Professor, what a beast of a bore!"

"No matter if it is. I believe in the conservation of all latent energy. Brenton's is all latent, and I count on you to do the conserving. I've been asking questions lately. From all accounts, you are the only man in college but myself who has taken the pains to get inside the poor beggar's shell."

"Hm. Well?" Opdyke's eyes were on the smoke in front of him; but, to the older man, it was plain that he was listening intently.

"Now you've got to go to work to get him out of his shell, so that people can see what he is like and, more than that, so that he can find out what people really are. He has no more knowledge of humanity than a six-months puppy; in fact, he hasn't so much. And--he's--got--to--learn." The words came weightily.

"What's the good?" Opdyke asked lazily.

The reply was unexpected, even to him who knew Professor Mansfield's downright ways.

"To teach him what an ass he really is. Till he finds that out--till you all find it out about yourselves, there's not much hope for any of you."

Opdyke flushed.

"Thanks," he said a little shortly.

Bending across the table, the old professor laid a friendly hand upon his arm.

"Don't be huffy, Reed. A few of you take in the knowledge with your mother's milk. That's what saves society, by marking it off into separate classes, what makes the difference between your father's son, and the strenuous scion of fifty ministerial Wheelers. But, because you've already got it, you owe all the more to the poor chaps who haven't."

"Yes, sir." Opdyke's reply came with dutiful promptness, although it was plain to the professor that he had flown quite beyond the limits of the young mind before him. "What do you want me to do with him, though?"

The professor's eyes twinkled, as he dragged himself back to the practical aspects of the case.

"Coax him out of his shell. If he won't come, then haul him out by the ears. Have him in your room and have some other men in there to meet him. Take him about with you. Take him to Mory's, on a thick night there. Show him life, the way you know it. If you must, show him an occasional siren. I can say this to you, Reed, because I have taken pains to find out that your sirens are pretty decent ones, cleaner than most of them. To sum it up, let Scott Brenton see life as you are living it, not as he imagines it from the point of view of the man who never can do anything but sit back in a corner and look on."

Opdyke filled his pipe anew, puffed at it silently, then spoke.

"Beastly tantalizing thing to do," he said. "What in thunder is the use?"

The professor spoke with sudden fervour.

"Much!" he said. "At least, it will teach him, when he's preaching for the Lord, to remember that Mammon isn't always quite so black as he is painted."

And so, on top of Reed Opdyke's other interests, Professor Mansfield laid the burden of Scott Brenton's worldly training. In pointing out the need of it to Opdyke, however, the old professor had been by no means as downright as he seemed. From above his lecture notes and his blowpipes, he kept keen eyes upon the members of his classes. Watching Scott steadily, in those days which followed upon the boy's bitter disappointment, he had seen new lines graving themselves about his lips, lines of decision now, not of worried mal-nutrition, lines that too easily might shape themselves to wilfulness. Scott, recluse that he had been, had also been as steady as a deacon; but the old professor realized that a reaction might come at almost any instant. One outlet, and that the highest one, forbidden him, he might seek other, lower ones in sheer bravado. Forbidden to climb into the Tree of Knowledge of all Good, he might, in revenge, fall greedily upon the Apples of Sodom. Left to himself, no one knew what harpies he might chance upon as comrades, nor what sights they might show him. To prevent all that, to provide him with an outlet which should be as wholesome as it was fresh and sparkling, the professor had given him into the safe hands of Reed Opdyke. It was as he said: he was quite well aware that, although Reed had his sirens, they all were curiously clean ones; in short, that his young Mammon was nobler far than many a senile God.

CHAPTER SIX

As a matter of course, Catie came to Scott's commencement. Had she answered sincerely to any questions put to her, she would have confessed to a two-fold purpose: the showing off of her proprietorship in Scott, and the showing off of her pair of new frocks, the most elaborate achievements as yet attempted by the village dressmaker. It must be confessed, however, that Catie found both of these deeds a little disillusioning. Scott was so busy in so many ways that he seemed to Catie to spare her only the smaller fragments of his time; and her two new gowns, which at home had been tried on amid the plaudits of the girl friends bidden to the private view, sank into insignificance beside the round dozen or more frocks which each of the other commencement guests was wearing in bewildering succession. To be sure, Catie's gowns had the most trimming on them; but her satisfaction in that fact was somewhat modified by the discovery that all her trimming was running the wrong way.

Nevertheless, Catie enjoyed some happy hours, despite the chilling disappointment of finding her frocks inadequate. It would have been nicer, of course, not to discover too late that she lacked the proper gown for any especial function; nicer to have seen herself, as she saw some other girls, girls not nearly so pretty as herself, attended, not by one swain only, but surrounded by a laughing, eager dozen. Still, there were compensations, chaperons among them. Catie's expressed regrets were wholly perfunctory, whenever Mrs. Brenton confessed that she was tired and needed to lie down.

For Mrs. Brenton also had come to Scott's commencement which, to her mind, was the crowning event of her own lifetime. Not only that, but somehow or other she had squeezed out the money to buy herself a new black silk gown, the first one since her marriage, more than twenty years before. Moreover, in deference to the prevailing styles, she explained to Scott on her way up from the station, she had had it made to hook up in the back above a little black lace tucker. Scott, as a matter of course, did not know a tucker from a turnip. None the less, he nodded his approval. That same evening, he confessed to himself a moderate degree of pride, when he introduced Reed Opdyke to his mother. Mrs. Brenton might lack certain social frills and furbelows; but no one could look into her honest face above the trim little black lace tucker, without realizing that she was of good, old-fashioned stock which never would degenerate. No one but a lady born could take herself so simply. Scott read Opdyke's approval in his eyes, the while he himself stood apart and talked to Catie.

It was when young Opdyke's eyes passed on to rest on Catie, though, that Scott felt certain doubts, lately risen up within him, crystallize and solidify past all gainsaying. Outwardly, Opdyke's manner was respect itself; but there was an odd little twinkle in his eyes, as he gazed down on the top of Catie's flower-strewn hat, now tipped coquettishly askew as the girl turned her head sidewise and upward to speak to her tall companion. Catie was pretty, of course; but was she quite--well--right? Were her manners, like the cut and colour of her garments, a thought too pronounced and noticeable? Was her voice a little bit too loud, her manner too assured? Or was it that those other girls beside her elbow were effete and colourless? Scott struggled to repress his doubts, while he watched the gay assurance with which Catie answered to Reed Opdyke's chaff. Scott was perfectly well aware that Opdyke would not have chaffed some of those other girls upon such short acquaintance, and the surety made him restless. He took it out in wishing that Catie had not adorned her girlish neck with a gilded chain which could have restrained a bulldog, or a convict.

Then he pulled himself up short. Catie was Catie, and his guest. She would have fought for him on any issue, and downed any number of foes in the fighting. To Mrs. Brenton, she was as dear as any daughter, dear as the daughter that she meant one day to be. Besides, who was he, a self-help student temporarily excused from waiting upon table and attired in a misfit evening coat hired from a ghetto tailor: who was he to criticise the flowers and frills of Catie? If she had had the chances which had come to him, if she could have gone to Smith, for instance, or Bryn Mawr, she would have come out of the mill a finished little product, clever, adaptable, and not a gawky, under-nourished, over-strenuous bumpkin like himself. In the depths of his self-abasement, Scott Brenton did not hesitate to ply himself with ugly adjectives. Indeed, they seemed to him to be doing something towards the removal of his doubts concerning Catie's pinchbeck chain.

Later, as it chanced, Reed Opdyke and Scott Brenton found themselves going up the street together.

"It's all hours, I suppose," Opdyke said rather indistinctly through a mammoth yawn. "Still, Brenton, what if it is? Come along to Mory's."

"Too late," Scott objected, with a guilty recollection of his mother who would have wrestled in prayer, all night long, could she have seen her son's steps turn towards Mory's and at the bacchanalian hour of half-past ten.

But Opdyke's hand was on his watch.

"Not a bit. Besides, it's our last chance, you know."

"Till next year," Scott corrected, though he yielded to the hand upon his arm.

Opdyke shook his head.

"No next year about it, Brenton. That's all off."

"What now?" Scott asked him in some surprise, for it had been an understood thing that Opdyke took his graduate science courses in the university that was giving him his bachelor's degree.

"The ancestral crank has slipped a cog," Opdyke returned profanely. "Being interpreted, my reverend sire thinks I'd do better work at the School of Mines and then in Europe. I'm sorry, too, confound it, even if I know his head is level. I'd been looking forward to the pleasure of romping along here for another year or two, and watching you get changed into a parson. It would have been well worth my while, too. It isn't every sinner like myself that has the chance to see a saint in the making. I should have found it an edifying spectacle." Then suddenly he broke off, and spoke with obvious sincerity. "Hang it all, Scott! What's the use? Chuck theology, and come along with me and be some sort of an engineer, or else the chemist old Mansfield has set his heart on making out of you."

As he spoke, his hand tightened on Scott's arm. Under the street light beside them, he could see the colour rush into the face of his companion, as if in answer to the touch and the appeal; could see the thin lips waver, then set themselves into a stern, hard line. Then,--

"It would break my mother's heart," Scott said gravely.

Instantly Opdyke flung up his head and relaxed the pressure of his hand.

"Then--last call for science!" he said, with a carelessness which did not quite ring true. "Your mother is worth the sacrifice, Brenton. I saw that for myself, to-night."

It was not until they were settled at an initial-hacked table in the smoke-thick air of Mory's that either of them spoke again. Then it was Opdyke who broke the silence.

"Who's the girl, Brenton? Your Book of Chronicles hasn't mentioned her, so far as I know."

"She's----" Scott hesitated, a little at a loss as to the proper way of cataloguing Catie.

Opdyke nodded at the hesitation.

"Ja. I comprehend. Well, she's a pretty thing, and she knows her good points," he answered. "That counts a lot, too, in a girl like that."

Scott turned on him a little bit pugnaciously, the more so by reason of his own doubts of an hour before.

"Like what?" he queried curtly.

However, Opdyke had no idea of being betrayed into any indiscretion.

"Like her," he made tranquil answer, and then he bent above his glass of beer and blew aside the froth. "She is sure to arrive," he went on, after a minute. "The only thing I question is whether you may not have to hustle a good deal, to keep up with her. You're a born student, Brenton, and a sanctimonious grind. Nevertheless, when it comes to the worldly question of arriving, you're a confoundedly lazy lubber, and I suspect you always will be."

Commencement over, and the intervening summer, Scott Brenton set himself to work to try to prove the falsity of Opdyke's words, by way of the divinity school. Moreover, as in the case of Opdyke, although in a wholly different sense, the parental plans for Scott had slipped a cog. He also left the university behind him, and went elsewhere in search of his professional degree. The change of plan, however, did not achieve itself without some tears and many lamentations upon the part of Mrs. Brenton. In carrying out her wishes that Scott should preach the gospel to the heathen, it never had occurred to her that he could preach any but the most azure forms of ultra-Calvinism. A sudden fading in the dye of his theology well-nigh destroyed all of her pleasure in his preaching.

The change in tint had come, to all appearing, during the summer that had followed his bachelor's degree. How far, however, the stability of the dyes had been affected by Scott's previous experiments in Professor Mansfield's laboratory, it would be hard to say. It is quite within the limits of scientific possibility that certain chemical changes might have been taking place for many months, changes so slight and so slow as to have escaped the notice of Scott or any of his friends who chanced to feel an interest in the soundness of his theology. Doubtless the change was there, potential, its elements held in suspension and only waiting for the final molecule to arrive and start precipitation.

The molecule arrived, that summer, in the person of a curly-haired young expounder of the Nicene Creed who came to spend July and August at the mountain inn where Scott, after the fashion of needy students New England over, was alternately engaged in keeping the books and sorting up the mail. It was by way of this latter function that Scott first came to be on speaking terms with the youthful rector of Saint-Luke-the-Good-Physician's. And the rector, despite his four hyphens and the gold cross that dangled on the front of his ecclesiastical waistcoat, was an honest, unspoiled boy who was quick to realize the curious appeal in the loneliness of Scott, to realize it and to answer to it.

The early steps of their acquaintance were limited to the daily handing out the letters, the daily thankful accepting them. Then, one morning, Scott so far forgot his official and personal manners as to comment upon the familiar imprint of one of the envelopes, as it was changing hands. He made instant apology; but his penitence was forgotten in the discovery that the curly-headed divine was also an old student of Professor Mansfield. The rest of the steps were logical and consecutive, down to those final days of August when together, hard-working, would-be student and holiday-making, prosperous divine, they spent Scott's leisure hours afield, talking, talking, talking of the things one only mentions to one's spiritual next of kin.

Before he left the mountains, Scott's mind was made up definitely to the step which was next before him. He knew that step would grieve his mother, would well-nigh break her heart. None the less, he was resolved to take it. Indeed, in honour, it seemed to him no other course was open to him, albeit, in his more downright moments, he realized that the taking it was nothing in the world but a miserable sort of compromise between his mother's wishes and his own. He had given her his word that he would be a preacher; keep his given word he must and would. Nevertheless, preaching, he must choose for himself a gentler sort of gospel than the lurid, flaming fires delighted in and set forth with all the cunning of word imagery, by every Parson Wheeler of his line. His God should be an honest gentleman, and not an all-pursuing Thing of Wrath.

For some reason he would have been loath to analyze, even to himself, it was to Catie that Scott first announced his change of plan. Catie took the announcement tranquilly. To her mind, religion was something that one put on, together with one's Sunday hat. There was no reason one of them should be unchanging in form more than the other. One's theology, like one's brims, should broaden with the fashion; the forms of worship might as well grow high as the outline of one's hat-crown. Given the three main elements of best clothes, a Sunday on which to wear them and an appreciative church to wear them in, and Catie asked no further consolations of religion. The tolerance Scott liked, although he deplored the cause.

"Lovely, Scott!" Catie said, with some enthusiasm, when at last she had grasped in its entirety, not Scott's idea, but the outward form in which it clothed itself. "You'll wear a surplice, then, and a purple stripe around your neck, and sing the prayers, like the man I saw in Boston. He had candles, too, burning at the back, beside a great brass cross."

Scott shook his head in swift negation. As yet, the higher forms of ritualism were totally unknown to him.

"That's Catholic, Catie," he reminded her. "Of course, I sha'n't do that."

"No; 'twas Episcopal," she contradicted. "It said so, on a sign beside the door. But, Scott, that makes me think--"

"Well?" he asked, wondering at her hesitation.

"Would you mind very much," she came forward to his side and fell to fingering the top button of his coat caressingly; "would you mind it so very much not to call me Catie any more?"

Absorbed as he was in his theological transference, he had felt sure that her request was on that selfsame theme, the more so, even, by reason of her unwonted hesitation. In his extreme surprise, he laughed a little at her question.

"Why not, Catie?"

She held up a forefinger of arch admonition.

"There you go again!" she told him, with mock petulance. "Do listen to me, Scott. You're so interested in your everlasting old churches that you haven't an idea to spare for me. I want you to promise that you won't ever call me Catie any more."

"But why? What shall I call you?" he inquired, with masculine and dazed bluntness.

"Catia. It is ever so much prettier; Catie is so babyish," she urged him.

"But, if it is your name?" he urged in return.

Her retort came with unexpected pith and promptness. Moreover, it struck home.

"So is the Baptist your church," she answered pertly. "I guess I have a right to change, as well as you."

Mrs. Brenton, that same evening, took the disclosure in quite a different spirit. To her mind, the relaxing of one's creed spelt ruin, the doorway of the church Episcopal was but the outer portal of the Church of Rome and, like all elderly women of puritanic stock who have spent their lives in a Protestant community, Mrs. Brenton looked on Rome as the last station but one upon the broad road to hell. None the less, she strove to phrase her objections as gently as she was able. However misguided Scott might be, she saw that he was in earnest, and upon that account she was the more loath to hurt him.

"Scott," she said, with what appeared to herself to be the extreme of tolerance; "if you must, I suppose you must; but I am sure that it will kill your grandfather."

If Scott, just then, had been in a mood for theological discussion, he might have pointed out to his mother the flaw in the logic of her own belief. Grandfather Wheeler, translated into the glory that awaits the faithful servant of the Lord, in all surety should have been beyond the danger of vicarious and everlasting death. However, Scott was too much in earnest, just then, about his own fate, to heed that of his worthy and departed grandsire.

"I am sorry, mother," he repeated gravely; "but I am afraid it is that, or nothing. All this summer, perhaps even before, I have been thinking things over. I'll be glad to preach. Maybe--" his accent was boyish in its extreme simplicity; "maybe, if I try my best, I'll do somebody a little good. But," and his face stiffened, as he spoke; "but I'll be hanged if I am going to stand up in the pulpit and say a whole lot of things I don't believe and don't want to believe, just because Grandfather Wheeler and Great-grandfather Wheeler and all that tribe did believe them."

Across his energy, his growing excitement, Mrs. Brenton's level voice cut in a little sternly.

"What is it that you don't believe, my son?" she asked him.

Scott rose to his feet, took a turn up the room, a turn down it. Then he faced her.

"I'm not sure I even know that--yet," he answered. "I've got to find it out. Honestly, mother," again there came a note of pleading; "isn't it about as much to the point to find out the things you don't believe as the things you do? And there must be some truth, somewhere, that's worth the preaching, no matter how many things you have to throw over, before you get to it. It's that I'm after now, a truth that is the truth, that can be proved. Once I get it, I'll stand up and preach it, and prove it, too, to every man I meet. That's what religion's for. But, to do it, I must go into a church which gives you a little leeway, a church which lets you interpret a few things to suit yourself, not lays down the law about the last little phrase of the meaning you are allowed to put into them."

Again there came the restless pacing of the room. This time, it lasted longer. At last, though, he halted by her side, and rested one lean hand upon her shoulder.

"Mother," he said, and now all boyishness had fallen away from him; "I am sorry if this is going to hurt you; but I can't help it. Two years ago, I told you I would study for the ministry. I shall keep my word; but the way I keep it must be left for me to choose."

There was no mistaking the resonant purpose in his voice. Recognizing it, his mother yielded to it of necessity. As quietly as possible, she accepted the choice that he had made, and then she went away to her own room. A half-hour later, kneeling beside her bed, she lost herself in supplication on behalf of those who bow the knee to Baal.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In the fulness of time, Scott married Catie. To put the case more accurately, albeit in less lovely phrase, Scott was married by Catie. From start to finish, Catie was the active force in whatever wooing achieved itself, the active force which swept down on and annexed a passive principle.

From the start, their courtship lacked most of the hallmarks of that tender process. There were few endearments, fewer still of the half-told, half-guessed confidences which, by their very fragmentary nature only serve to add emphasis to a comprehension that can construct a living, vital intimacy out of such slight materials. Indeed, there was no especial effort at spiritual comprehension between them. Instead, their unsentimental wooing was a sort of amatory bargain day for Catie, who must have the best sort of husband to be found on the domestic market. For Scott, on the other hand, it was the bored acquiescence of a man too full of other dreams and hopes and even concrete plannings to regard the choosing of a wife as more important than the selection of his next-morning's steak. His mother had impressed upon him that Catie would be the best wife possible for him. The professors in the divinity school had laid some stress upon the advantage of their clergy's marrying young. Therefore Scott Brenton dutifully took to himself a wife, without the slightest previous notion of what domestic intercourse was bound to mean.

Notwithstanding the education given him by Reed Opdyke and his pseudo sirens, young Scott Brenton was singularly ignorant of the elements that go into the making of almost any woman, singularly ignorant regarding all the practical details of wedded life. Of course, he knew his mother well; but she seemed to him a little bit archaic. Besides, he knew her only as a thing apart from all other human relations, as an isolated personality whose one point of contact was with himself. The society of a woman who parted her hair straight down the middle of her head and who quoted Job at breakfast was not a perfect preparation for modern domestic life.

As for Catie, or Catia, as she now called herself, she was modern enough, distressingly so sometimes. Nevertheless, analyzed, she would not have seemed to Scott at all domestic. She was too much wrapped up in her own personal concerns, too uncomprehending in a spiritual crisis. Domesticity, to be practical, must consist of something else than mere ability to keep a house and to extract from the butcher the best cuts obtainable for one's income. One's spiritual bric-a-brac must be taken down and dusted with just as careful reverence as one shows the glass things on one's mantel. Catia could cut her own cloth up into pieces, and then sew up the pieces into quite presentable garments; she could make good coffee and cook lamb chops to perfection; but, that done, she could not sit down of an evening and fling herself, heart and soul, into the interests of her husband's life.

Of this, as yet, Scott Brenton was mercifully ignorant. He might have known it; but, unhappily, he never had found it altogether worth his while to meditate very much upon the question. He passed by Catia as an established fact; he left her quite unanalyzed. Instead, he turned the whole force of his analytic power upon the needs of his profession, without in the least realizing that, in the case of a married man, professional acumen and efficiency depend a good deal upon the quality of his domestic atmosphere. Later on, he was destined to find out that a family jar at breakfast, a discussion born of a muddy cup of coffee or a sticky muffin, can wreck the fervour of a sermon born of a week of prayer and meditation, wreck it at so late an hour that any salvage is impossible.

"Really," Catia observed to her solitary bridesmaid, a week before the wedding day; "you'd never think it that Scott was just getting ready to be married; would you?"

The bridesmaid was not so much tactless as envious. As she and Catia were well aware, Scott Brenton was the one really personable man upon the horizon of their village life, the only man who seemed to have it in him to translate a wife out of that humdrum village into the seething world beyond. Of course, it was nice of Catia to have chosen her for bridesmaid. Nevertheless, it would have been far, far more agreeable, if only she could have been the bride. Therefore,--

"No," she answered flatly. "No; I never would. I'd think he ought to be in a perfect twitter, by this time; but he takes it as calmly as if a wedding weren't any more important than a sack of beans."

Catia, hoping for a prompt denial of the point of view she had put forth, was conscious of a certain pique at the prompt agreement. She showed her pique with equal promptness, and phrased it in unanswerable rebuke.

"How common you are, Eva!" she said quite scornfully. "A sack of beans! One would know your father kept a country store."

Eva Saint Clair Andrews felt herself justified in the retort discourteous.

"It is better to keep a country store than it is to hoe your own potatoes, barefoot," she responded tartly. "Besides, what about Scott Brenton's father?"

Then, catching sight, by way of the mirror, of Catia's irate countenance, she stayed her speech. Already, she well realized, her bridesmaid's robes were in the extreme of jeopardy. Unsatisfactory as it was going to be to take the second place at Scott Brenton's wedding, it would be far more unsatisfactory to take the twenty-second, and watch the ceremony from one of the rear pews of the church, instead of from the front aisle which answers architecturally to the functions of the chancel. Besides, there was going to be a visiting minister extra, a rector who was a classmate of Scott Brenton and therefore rather young. And no one ever knew. Accordingly, Eva Saint Clair Andrews, called usually by the whole of her name, even in intimate address, stayed her speech and, after a fashion, temporized.

"Of course," she added, with a hasty giggle; "a minister like Scott is more used to weddings than we girls are."

Turning from the mirror, Catia spoke with a dignity which was crushing.

"But not to his own," she informed her guest.

And Eva Saint Clair Andrews gave up the effort to extricate herself from disgrace. Instead, she fell upon discussion of the wedding plans.

"How many do you expect at the reception, Catia?" she made query, with an accent which discretion had suddenly rendered exceedingly full of respect.

"Oh, I can't stop to count them up," Catia replied, with magnificent carelessness. "I've asked about everybody in town, of course. Mother would have insisted on it, anyway; and, besides, Scott's position would make us do it, even if he were the only one to count."

Eva Saint Clair Andrews opened her blue eyes a little wider than was quite becoming.

"I didn't suppose the Brentons were----" she was beginning.

But Catia interrupted, with a fresh access of magnificence.

"Not the Brentons, Eva," Catia had only lately forbidden herself the village use of the full name, and her sudden recollection of the fact caused her to speak with nippy brevity; "not the Brentons, but just Scott himself. Of course, we owe it to his cloth."

"Yes," Eva Saint Clair Andrews answered, in an appreciative murmur. None the less, lacking the training vouchsafed to Catia by the closing functions of the divinity school, she wondered what the cloth might be, that it should so outrank good Mrs. Brenton in its claim to social precedence.

A week later, came the wedding. Even the most carping one of all the village gossips was ready to agree that it had thrown new lustre over the entire community, and even shed its beams into the next county whence certain of the guests had come. There had been many guests and some unusual costumes. The church had been filled with a wealth of flowers, chiefly of the home-grown species, until the place reeked with the spicy odours, not of Araby the blest, but of a kitchen garden, or a soup bunch.

Beside the village parson, there had been three young clergymen in attendance and more or less in active service while the nuptial knot was being tied. Indeed, so many were there of them and so active were they in their ministrations that poor Mrs. Brenton, down in the front pew and painfully shiny between her proud maternal tears and the reflected lustre of her new black satin frock, was never quite certain in her mind which one of them, in the end, had pronounced her son and Catia man and wife. For the sake of the ancestral Wheelers, she hoped it was the broadcloth-coated village parson; but she had her doubts. Her doubts increased into a positive agony of uneasiness when she discovered, at the reception later on, that the three young clergymen, with one consent, had put their waistcoats on hind side before. Had she conceived the notion that, within the limits of three years, her son would adopt the same preposterous fashion, she would have believed herself in readiness for the nearest madhouse. Mercifully, however, so much was spared her, at that time and for ever after.

The reception itself was a glorious occasion. Practically the entire village was present, a good half of them in new frocks manufactured by themselves in honour of the great event. It was now four years and seven months since there had been a wedding in the village. The local type of damsel was a pre-natal spinster, and the few village boys went otherwhere in search of wives. Brides there had been, of course; but they had been of the ready-made variety. Other communities had had the glory of the weddings. It was not every day, by any means, that the local leaders of society were asked to prepare themselves a wedding garment. They stitched away all the more cunningly on that account. Judged by the standards of the _Ladies' Galaxy_, their gowns were models of the mode. Viewed even in the uncritical eyes of the visiting clergy, they were, as has been said, unusual.

Aside from gowns, the reception was chiefly notable for its cake; not cakes, but solid loaves made up in layers with oozy sweetnesses sandwiched in between. Served with neither forks nor napkins, it gave rise to complications; but it was none the less appreciated upon that account. There were two kinds of lemonade, too, one plain, one mixed with home-brewed grape juice. In all surety, Catia's wedding reception left nothing lacking on the score of elegance. Later, her satisfaction was obvious in her shining eyes, as she halted, half-way down the front stairs, to look upon her guests. The reception was nearing its end, for Catia was now dressed for going away, and topped with a hat which combined the more essential characteristics of the helmet of the British grenadier and a mascot upon a Princeton football field. Indeed, it was almost as rigid in its outlines as was the smile which creased its wearer's lips. Catia was not unimpressive in her new dignity of wifehood; but the dignity bore traces of diligent rehearsal, and left singularly little to the imagination. By her side, Scott, looking down upon his fellow townsmen, wore the self-conscious smirk of a sheepish schoolboy; and the best of his fellow townsmen respected him the more on that account. Catia was the more impressive of the two, they told themselves; but there was no especial sense in a pair of young things like these, trying to act as if their getting married were a mere fact of every-day routine.

Smiling steadily, Catia stood there, waiting until, by very force of motionless persistence, she had focussed every eye upon her person. Then, according to the mandates of the _Ladies' Galaxy_, she hurled her bridal bouquet down across the banister, not upon the waiting Eva Saint Clair Andrews who hankered for it lustily, but straight against the manly waistcoat of the least and the pinkest one of the visiting clergy, a youth of twenty-five or six who had reluctantly torn himself away from an anxious wife and a croupy baby, on purpose to be on hand at Brenton's wedding. Mercifully for Catia's poise, her young husband forebore explaining to her the reason for the three-fold clerical roar which went up upon the heels of her well-meant attention.

Afterwards, in looking backward, that evening seemed to Scott to stand out as a dream, unforeseen, yet not inconsequential. Nothing that had gone before appeared to him to be able to explain it. It just was, a fact without any planning or volition on his part. He had known Catia from his little boyhood, had been used to her, had counted on her in a sense; but always he had held himself a little bit aloof from her, even when, to outward seeming, he had sought her with the greatest regularity. Early in their intercourse, indeed, he had discovered the main fact of all those which were to govern their later life together: that he could not so much talk over things with her, as talk them over with himself when she was present.

And then, all at once and without warning, Catia had swept in and dominated him completely, dominated him with her oozy layer cake, and her two sorts of lemonade, and with her Princeton grenadier of a hat. Beside it all, he felt himself dwindling into insignificance, despite the hind-side-before waistcoats of the visiting clergymen and his mother's gown of stiff black satin. It was a positive relief to him when he could turn his back upon the whole hot, chattering function, and, with Catia's new gilt-initialled bag to balance his much-rubbed suitcase, go striding away to the station underneath the wintry freshness of the night. Catia had rebelled at the idea of walking to their train; but the one hack afforded by the village had gone away to a funeral in the next town but two.

So they went stepping out into the new life before them: Catia Brenton and Scott, her husband. To Catia it seemed that, the first of her milestones reached, it was time for her to sit down for a while, and rest, and take a little comfort out of thinking over what she already had achieved. To Scott, the first stage of his journey had scarcely been begun. Indeed, it did not even start from that night, nor from any night in which Catia's memory could have a share. And yet, asked, he would have been swift to affirm that he loved Catia; that life ahead of him, without her for his wife, would be unsatisfactory, perhaps a little vacant. Catia had always been a part of his environment, ever since the long-gone day when she had hailed him, sodden in his weeping, the while he cooled his nether man upon the chilly doorstep.

For nearly twenty years, they had been meeting life together, and comparing notes upon the impressions they had gained. Often and often, each one had found the other's notes a cipher, had lacked the cipher's proper code. Nevertheless, there had been a certain sense of intimacy in the mere fact of the comparison. Without Catia in his past, Scott Brenton would have been lonely. Therefore he felt it safe to reason that, without her in his future, the loneliness would become infinitely worse. The marriage, in its inception, might have been altogether Catia's doing. In the end, he had been giving it his full assent, and he took his marriage vows in all sincerity, determined to do his best towards their fulfilment.

His fingers shut quite closely, then, upon the slippery handle of Catia's new bag, and he stepped a bit nearer to her side, as they halted beneath the shining stars, to look back upon what they left behind them. Catia saw the huddled gathering of the village people, already looking a little dowdy to her critical eyes. Scott only saw four faces, grouped in perspective: his mother, tearful, a little tremulous, yet radiant in her full content; behind her, two of the visiting clergy, classmates and chums of the divinity school, and, still behind these two, the eager young face of the curly-headed rector of the many hyphens, the man who first had opened his eyes to a brand-new gospel, one of fatherly affection, not of pursuant wrath, a gospel elastic as the mind of man, plastic as the flowing life of all the ages, not a hard and fast affair whose boundaries were laid down for all time, hundreds of years before. And this was the man of them all, and not the broadcloth village parson, whom Scott Brenton had chosen to pronounce himself and Catia man and wife.

Why not?

Scott waved his hand. His mother sought her handkerchief, though not to wave it. His two classmates saluted him, the one with Catia's big bouquet, the other with a crochetted "throw" snatched from the nearest chair. Above them all, though, the curly-headed rector flung up his arm in greeting, and with his arm his voice.

"Bless you, old man, and keep at it! Remember I'm always in the same old corner, if you ever need me."

And Scott Brenton took the assurance with him, as he entered into his new life.

CHAPTER EIGHT

"Scott," Catia let go the coffee pot and looked up to face him; "I do wish you'd begin to think about smartening yourself up a little."

Brenton, who still clung to his bachelor habit of reading the newspaper between swallows of coffee and snatches of toast and jam, looked up at the arraignment which lay in Catia's tone, if not within her words.

"Smarten myself up?" he echoed, in blank question.

"Yes." Catia put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands around her cup. "I was looking at you, Scott, all the time this last convocation was going on."

He smiled benevolently, by way of preparation for flinging himself once more upon the columns of his morning paper.

"You'd much better have been looking at the Bishop," he advised her good-temperedly.

She shook her head.

"The Bishop was all right," she said, with an emphasis so caustic as to catch and hold his attention.

Used as he had become, the past two years, to pinpricks of this sort, his colour betrayed how much the present pinprick hurt him. None the less, he still held on to his temper.

"And I wasn't?" he queried, with an effort at a smile. "Sorry, Catia. What's the trouble?"

"All sorts of little things," she answered, with a disconcerting frankness. "Not any one of them count for much; but, taken all together, they're----" She hesitated for a word.

Brenton supplied it.

"Deplorable!" Then he added, "Sorry, Catia, as I said before. Still, I suppose, if I'm not a beauty, I'm about what the good Lord made me."

"Fudge!" She put down her cup and rested her chin upon her palms. Seen across the table and in a pose so undeniably feminine and so becoming to almost every woman, Catia was good to look upon; would have been good, that is, had not her personality been uncomfortably domineering. The two years since her marriage had rubbed down certain of her angles, and had given her at least a superficial polish. She occasionally admitted to herself that she was very near to being handsome. A more critical observer and one less prejudiced, however, might possibly have added that she was curiously devoid of charm.

Brenton, on the other hand, was growing curiously magnetic, as the months ran on, was developing a personal charm of which his student days had given scarcely any hint. The old lines, born of hard work and scanty nourishment, had vanished from his face. In place of them had come other lines, vastly more becoming, lines engraved by earnest, conscientious thought and study, by a life so ascetic as to be a little narrow, perhaps, but noble enough in its aspirations to lift itself high above the common level. He still was lean and thin, still a little stooping. The habits of his life would account for that; he was too busy saving other men's souls to give much thought to the preservation of his own body.

Even in a small and humdrum country parish, the souls of men need careful shepherding; every now and then there comes a petty crisis when they confess to a desire for outside guidance, and it was in such crises that Scott Brenton found his opportunity. His sermons, albeit a trifle immature, were really clever. None the less, they dwindled into insignificance beside the practical, personal help he gave to his parishioners, a help that came without the asking, whether the crisis were a dying cow, a small son's broken arm, or a fire in a granary just after the final harvest. Whatever happened in the parish, for good or ill, Scott Brenton always appeared upon the scene. At the very first, he had come of his own accord. Later, if his arrival delayed itself for a dozen minutes, he was sent for in hot haste. In every crisis, he was ready with practical advice; but he worked with both hands, the while he gave it.

Under such conditions, how he wrote his sermons was a question unanswerable by any one but Catia who trimmed the lamps, next morning. To Catia's great disgust, despite the scale of living due to his profession, Brenton had taken it quietly for granted that, for the present, they would keep no maid. His salary was small; he must have something saved to give away in cases of emergency. Catia and he were strong, and the rectory was small. Of course, Catia could have a little girl to come in at odd hours. What other help she needed, he would give her out of his scanty leisure. And Catia, who had dreamed of a luxurious idleness unknown to most women in that community of simple habits, was forced to tie on a wide pinafore and roll up her sleeves above a steaming dishpan. She did it all, however, with an air of patient martyrdom which was not lost upon her husband; while, upon the rare occasions when they entertained a clerical guest, she added an extra note of unaccustomed abnegation which was intended to impress upon the guest that she was the hapless victim of a fall from better days. The parish, in so far as she was able, she disdained completely. At the infrequent times that she was driven into close quarters with it, she made up for her unpopularity among the vestrymen by taking it out most vigorously upon their wives. Indeed, her lifelong familiarity with what she termed the narrowness of a small community made her the more intolerant, now that its groove was closing about her for a second time.

Therefore, for over a year now, Catia secretly had chafed with the friction of her surroundings. As yet, however, she had not confessed to Brenton the chafing, had not explained to him that her eyes were searching their horizon for any possible loophole of escape. Catia was more wise than are most women. She never wasted any breath in demanding absolute futilities. For the present, she saw clearly, Brenton was quite contented with his parish. For the present, it was enough for his young ambitions to know he had a parish and was doing it some good. Later, she would take a hand in stirring up his slumbering ambition. If she knew Scott at all, he would not be content for ever with preaching to country farmers and dandling their babies on his knees; nor with interspersing moral reflections with inquiries regarding the season's crops; nor with basing his sermons upon the tares and the wheat, and the fig tree, and other texts so palpably bucolic in their interest. However, Catia would grant him a little resting time, before she goaded him up to girding his loins anew. Indeed, he needed it, she admitted freely to herself in her more generous moments. The years of study, long at best, and, in his case, lengthened by needful intervals of money-earning toil, had taken it out of him badly. He needed a little time to recover from their strain, to grow accustomed to his new dignity as preacher and to learn to take himself a little less strenuously, before he would be fitted to assume his proper place in a wider field than any of which as yet he appeared to be dreaming.

However, two years, it seemed to Catia, had been an ample rest-time. Therefore,--

"Fudge!" she said. And then, "Don't be profane, Scott," she rebuked him, with the literalness which had replaced her meagre childish sense of humour. "The good Lord didn't make your surplices a full eighth of a yard too long, nor put you into a black stole for the whole year round. Besides, you were the only man in that whole convocation that buttoned his collar in front. I should have supposed you'd have known better than that, before you got your license."

Brenton's lips curved into the little smile she always dreaded. Because she dreaded it, it antagonized her.

"Did you?" he queried.

Her antagonism lent a tartness to her reply.

"I never professed to go through a divinity school," she retorted. "If I had, though----" Her pause was fraught with meaning.

He made no effort to discount the meaning. Instead,--

"I don't doubt it, Catia," he responded quietly. "However, as it happens, I had some other things to think about."

That brought her to a momentary halt. However, she swiftly rallied.

"Some people can think of more than one thing at a time," she announced, with something of the same accent in which, long years before, she had ejaculated "Dirty-Face!"

But Brenton's mind was hungrily intent upon his paper. Not even two years of Catia's corrective moods had taught him to grasp the fact that she would never cease from her corrections until he had given evidence of writhing underneath their sting. It was not enough for her to have the last word; she must be left in a position to gloat upon its visible effect. Else, wherein lay the pleasure of having given it utterance? Brenton, with manlike unconsciousness of this great fact of feminine psychology, once more buried himself in his morning paper. Promptly and ruthlessly Catia exhumed him.

"Scott," she said, with a petulance which she permitted herself but rarely, not so much for moral reasons as because the _Ladies' Galaxy_ had pronounced it bad for the complexion; "do put down that stupid paper and attend to me."

"Yes, dear." And Brenton blinked a little, in the sudden change of focus demanded of his eyes.

Catia only saw the blinking, and to herself she pronounced it a new and ugly mannerism. She did not take the trouble to notice the eyes themselves, to read the earnest desire to please her, written so plainly in their luminous gray depths.

"Oh, do wake up!" she adjured him, with increasing impatience. "Scott, do you know you never really come to life till after breakfast? Can't you see I want to talk to you? Now do listen and answer me. What do you mean to do about this Saint Peter's matter?"

"To do about it!" It was no especial wonder that the echo irritated Catia; and yet neither was it any especial wonder that Scott, in his astonishment, was betrayed into an echo of that sort. As yet, her meaning was opaque to him.

"Yes, do about it," Catia echoed, in her turn. "They say there's sure to be a vacancy, and that it's a splendid place."

"Who say?" Brenton queried cautiously.

"All the convocation. Don't be a dunce and pretend, Scott. Anyway, I'm not a mole; I can see which way the weather vanes are pointing. They were all talking about it, while the convocation was going on. Ever so many of the wives spoke to me about it, and told me that you were the man who ought to have it."

Quite tranquilly Brenton helped himself to more butter.

"Then, knowing the Bishop's common sense, it seems highly probable to me that I shall be the man to get it," he responded.

"You won't, unless you try for it," Catia assured him.

He shook his head. The idea of ecclesiastical wirepulling was repugnant to his nature.

"One doesn't try for things of that kind, Catia," he answered.

"Then one doesn't get them," she retorted curtly.

It was Brenton who broke the next period of silence.

"Besides," he said, as if his sentences had followed each other without break; "I am not at all sure that my work here is done, by any means."

"Scott!" Catia put on the cover of the sugar bowl with a defiant clash. "Surely, you don't mean to stay buried in this little hole much longer?"

Once more his smile showed whimsical.

"Really, Catia, I hadn't thought about it as a hole," he said. "About my staying here or anywhere, I suppose it all depends upon the Bishop."

She pushed her chair back a little from the table, and then clasped her hands upon the table's edge. Her attitude betokened her intention of staying there until the matter had been fought out to a finish.

"Not one half so much upon the Bishop as it does upon yourself," she told him firmly. "The Bishop decides things in the end; but he never originates them. Unless you stir yourself a little and show him that you're restless, you'll be welcome to sit for all time to come in one corner of the diocese. In fact, you have been sitting in a corner for two years. It is high time you showed him you were getting cramps in your knees, and needed a higher seat to straighten them out. There is no especial sense in your wasting your time among these people. Any broken-down old hack ought to be all they've any right to look for."

"But not all they need," Brenton interpolated swiftly.

She waved aside the interpolation.

"It's what you need, Scott, I'm talking about," she told him. "You are young, and you need a chance. What's more, the Bishop isn't going to offer it to you, until you give him to understand that you expect it. There are too many hungry mouths open for every bit of advantage to make it worth his while to hunt for any more. As for Saint Peter's, they all say it is an ideal parish: a rich church in a college town, with a large salary and not too much work. In fact," Catia added wisely; "they all say that there never does need to be too much work in a parish where a good share of the congregation are very young, and transients."

Brenton lifted his head. Then he lifted his brows, fine, narrow brows and arching.

"It strikes me that there might be all the more," he said.

Catia's fingers beat a tattoo on the table.

"You're just for all the world like your mother, Scott," she said, with renewed impatience.

"I hope so," Brenton assented gravely, for Mrs. Brenton had died, a year before, and her memory still was sacred in the mind of her son.

Not even Catia, in her present mood, dared introduce a jarring note, until a little interval had followed upon Scott's grave reply. She, too, had cared for Mrs. Brenton; at least, she had cared as much as it was in her to care for any one. She, too, had mourned sincerely, when the patient, unselfish, plodding life went out. Indeed, there had seemed to be no little cruelty in the fate which had ordained that Mrs. Brenton, after giving her life and strength and all her prayers to the equipment of her son in his profession, should not have been allowed a little longer time to take pleasure in the things her tireless effort had accomplished. For, though Scott had done his best to help himself, the real strain had rested on his mother, the more real in that it had been unbroken by the variety of his student existence, unrewarded by the elating consciousness of personal achievement which had come to him at the end of every stage of his development.

In all truth, it had been upon Mrs. Brenton that the burden had fallen most heavily. She had accomplished the almost impossible achievement; yet to her had been denied the fullest fruition of her dreams. Scott was a clergyman at last, a preacher, it was said, of more than ordinary promise; but the gospel that he was going forth to preach to all men was not a gospel accredited by any of the ancestral Parson Wheelers. Therefore it was that, after all her struggle, poor Mrs. Brenton died, a disappointed woman. Therefore it was that, by the very reason of the sincerity of his own decisions, Scott, her son, realized her disappointment, and cherished her memory the more tenderly on that account. Vaguely, but resolutely, he had clung to the hope that the day would dawn when his mother would come into his own way of thinking. He only resigned that hope, while he listened to the prayer of the village parson beside his mother's open grave. It was an extemporaneous prayer; but it lacked no detail on that account. And there are few things in life more tragic than permanent misunderstandings between a child and parent. That this one must now be permanent not even Scott Brenton's theological tenets could leave him room for doubt.

Catia's cause for mourning was by far more practical. She realized that it was Mrs. Brenton who had provided her with a professional husband, in place of the petty farmers and shopkeepers who, otherwise, had bounded her horizon. Moreover, she missed Mrs. Brenton sorely, when there came a need to discuss Scott's faults and failings, to plan how best to put an end to them before they stood in the way of his career. Also of her career. For, despite her manifest disdain of the village parish where, as it seemed to her, Scott was merely marking time, Catia had her own keen notions as to the part, granted a suitable environment to serve as stage, a rector's wife could play. Saint Peter's, taken as a stage, would admirably suit her purposes. A college town, and a girls' college town at that, could not fail to surround the rector's lady, not only with a proper train of satellites, but with an audience worthy of her utmost powers.

Already, at the recent convocation, she had probed the subject cleverly. That is, in the most incidental fashion, she had led the talk around to the new Bishop of Western Oklahoma, had casually mentioned the parish whence he had clambered to the bishop's throne, and then, in greedily receptive silence, she had listened to the scraps of conversation evoked by her apparently careless words. At first, her investigations had been carried on among the other diocesan wives. Finding them, to all seeming, gullible and loquacious, she had even ventured on the Bishop. And the good old Bishop, near-sighted and slightly hard of hearing, had carried away the genial impression that Brenton's wife was a very pretty woman and would be of inestimable help to him in managing a parish. Indeed, the Bishop, who was celibate, thought much about the helpful influence of a proper wife, the evening after his short talk with Catia. He even wondered whether he had been quite wise in allowing the two of them--for, ever afterward, he persisted in thinking of them jointly--to be buried in a country parish where it was possible an experienced widower might manage the work alone.

Of this, however, and of the good Bishop's later meditations and of his consequent questionings and investigations, Catia unhappily was in ignorance. Her ignorance, moreover, led her now into employing on her husband the final weapon in her woman's quiver, namely pathos.

She dropped her eyes to her fingernails, and spoke with reverential deliberation.

"She was a good woman, Scott, a dear, good woman, even if she always was a little narrow. It can't fail to be a pleasure to you now to think back to the way we have done our best to carry out her wishes as--" suddenly Catia bethought herself of the change in the label of their theology--"as far as our own consciences would allow us. And now, dear boy," her eyes drooped lower still over her request; "now that you haven't her to consider any longer, aren't you willing to do just one very, very little thing for me?"

"I hope so, Catia," Brenton responded, still quite gravely. "What is it that you want?"

Despite her efforts to the contrary, her voice thrilled with the sudden surety that she had gained her cause.

"Write to the Bishop, dear, and tell him you will take Saint Peter's, when he offers it," she begged him.

Brenton lifted his head to stare at her, aghast.

"Catia, I can't," he told her sternly.

Nevertheless, in the end of things, he did. His later self-reckonings were all the more severe on that account. In more senses than one, Scott Brenton's rest-time ended with his turning his back upon the country parish.

CHAPTER NINE

"Well, what do you think about it, father?" Olive Keltridge queried, as she tapped the table with the corner of the note she was holding in her hand.

The tapping, however, was no indication of any filial impatience. It was merely to remind her parent that something was still expected of him, before he drifted off again into an absent-minded study of the medical journal clutched between his fists. Olive Keltridge would have been the last person in the world to dissent from the general adoration of her father. He was all in all to her, as she to him. None the less, she was driven to admit at times that it was a trifle difficult to keep him up to his social duties.

Olive's mother had died, six years before. The girl had come out of school to take upon her slim young shoulders the management of her father's house. Moreover, in that aged town where, aside from a few score new professors and their callow young assistants, everybody's grandparents had played dolls and tin soldiers together, Dr. Keltridge's absent-minded fashion of failing to provide his daughter with a feminine chaperon had caused no comment whatsoever. Everybody that one met out at dinner knew all about everybody else for several generations. Either they were indigenous, and born knowing; or else, imported and properly accredited, they took measures to inform themselves at the earliest possible opportunity. All the other people, whom one saw in church and in the street cars, did not count at all.

For that reason, no one appeared to find it at all strange that, from the day she put on long frocks, Olive Keltridge should preside, unchaperoned, at her father's table, should receive her father's guests without other protection from their wiles than that accorded by his presence. To be sure, that presence was not invariably dependable. On more than one occasion, Olive had been obliged to delay the serving of the dinner and excuse herself from her waiting guests, while she went in search of her father in his laboratory. The guests, though, as a rule, had known Doctor Eustace Keltridge even longer than his daughter had had the chance to do. They forgot their hunger completely in their amused curiosity as to the condition in which their host would put in his appearance.

Olive Keltridge was a born hostess. She had been prompt to grasp the fact that guests should be amused as well as fed, prompt to realize that a family skeleton can easily be converted to a family Jack-in-the-box, if only he can be snatched from the closet and manipulated with a little tact. Upon the first occasion of her father's failure to line up beside her in season to receive his guests, she had gone in search of him a little petulantly, had reappeared beside him, hot-cheeked and a trifle sulky. That one experience had been the last one of its kind, however. Olive had lain awake, that night, to ponder on the interval between the time of her discovering her sire, his hair rampant, his necktie shockingly awry and his sleeves rolled up, messing contentedly among his pots and pans of cultures and totally oblivious of his waiting guests, and the much later time when she had literally driven him, irreproachably clad and beaming delightedly, into the drawing-room ahead of her. She had thought it all over, all, from the quality of the delayed dinner down to the things that the guests were likely to be saying in her absence. Then, young as she was, she took her resolution. After that, she would catch her father suddenly, and bring him back, red-handed. A man like Doctor Keltridge ought not to be reduced to the conventional dead level of his fellow townsmen; it would be a waste of rare material. Rather, as the phrase is, he should be featured. And Olive proceeded to feature him accordingly, to the solid satisfaction of her father and to the no small rapture of his old-time cronies.

As a matter of course, under this new and unorthodox arrangement, a dinner invitation at the Keltridges' became a thing of almost infinite value. Apart from the surety of the good dinner, and the cordial welcome of the pretty little hostess who, young as she was, yet understood to the full the delicate distinction between chat and chatter: apart from all this was the humorous question contained within the host. No one could ever foretell whether he would greet them on the threshold in his overcoat and goloshes, or be invisible until the dinner was announced, and then be led in by one cuff, like a guilty youngster caught among the jam pots. No one ever could foretell, either, what would be the doctor's costume for the evening, whether it would combine a dinner jacket and a four-in-hand, or whether a wadded housecoat and no necktie at all above his evening linen would announce to his guests that a sudden thirst for knowledge had cut athwart his dressing and sent him to the laboratory to discover how some malignant brew or other might be getting on. Upon one point only Olive, product of these modern days, stood firm. Her father might be as charmingly erratic as he chose; but he must sterilize his hands, before he came into the drawing-room. And upon that one point of domestic discipline his guests rested in placid confidence, sure that, as long as Olive was at the helm, they could devour the Keltridge dinners in reasonable surety of not being poisoned.

If Doctor Keltridge was charming as host, he was even more charming, taken as a father. He was adoring, indulgent, whimsical, and singularly tactful in spite of his absent-minded lapses. To Olive, indeed, he seemed to be the only man at all well worth the while. Nevertheless, as now, it sometimes became imperative to be a little masterful in summoning him back to present consciousness just long enough to extract an answer from him. Therefore she tapped the table sharply with the corner of the note.

"Listen, father!" she urged him, as she laid her other hand across the open paper. "What shall I say?"

"Say that they are impossible young asses, a year and a half behind the times," her father growled, the while he shifted his paper slightly, to free its final column from her covering fingers.

A total stranger to the doctor might have distrusted either his own ears, or else the doctor's sanity. Olive knew her father, though; she felt no forebodings, albeit her eyes danced at the unexpected nature of his response.

"I am afraid that Mrs. Dennison might not take it nicely, if I did," she said.

The doctor's growl rumbled forth once more.

"Better know what one is talking about, then. That theory was all exploded, months ago." Then some echo of his daughter's words seemed at last to be penetrating his brain, and he lowered his paper with a sigh. "What has Mrs. Dennison to do with a thing like this, Olive?" he queried blankly. "Dennison is only history, not biological."

Olive laughed outright.

"And Mrs. Dennison is only socio-hospitable," she responded. "Father, you really are terrible, this morning."

The doctor smiled benevolently at her arraignment. Then, hurriedly gathering himself together, he stuck out an appealing cup for some more coffee.

Olive shook her head.

"No; not one other drop. You have had five, already. If you don't stop at that, I'll tell the cook to put you on to postum. Now please do listen to me. I was asking you whether we'd best go to this dinner of Mrs. Dennison's."

"When?" the doctor inquired.

Olive's lips twitched at the corners.

"About a half an hour ago," she answered. "No, wait." Swiftly she seized and snatched away the paper, just as her father was preparing to bury himself anew. "The dinner is next Thursday, to meet Mr. Brenton."

"Who is Mr. Brenton?" her father asked, with bland interest.

"The new rector. You heard him, two weeks ago, you know." This time, Olive's accent held a slight reproach. Purely as a matter of heredity, Doctor Keltridge was senior warden of Saint Peter's; but, as a general rule, he totally forgot to go to church.

"Oh, yes, yes. The new chap with the voice." The doctor roused himself suddenly. "It is a wonderful voice, Olive; his whole respiratory system must be perfect, and his lungs. I never heard a better resonance nor better breath control. Really, I'd like to hear him speak at closer range. When did you say the dinner is? Of course, we'll go. Dennison isn't a bad little fellow, even if his mind did stop short at history."

"The dinner is for Thursday," Olive reiterated patiently.

"Thursday. Hm. What am I doing then?" her father questioned for, as may be imagined, it was Olive who kept the run of his engagements.

"Nothing, after the hospital directors' meeting at two. Really," Olive spoke a little absently, herself; "I almost wish that you were."

As invariably happened, the doctor's attention became alert when she least expected it.

"Eh? What?" he asked her, in manifest surprise, for it was most unusual for Olive to balk at any invitation.

Her colour came.

"Oh, it's all right. Of course, we'll go. In fact, there's no getting out of it, as long as you are senior warden."

The doctor fished for the cord of his see-off glasses. When they were astride his nose,--

"You like Mrs. Dennison, Olive," he said crisply. "Therefore, by a process of elimination, it probably is the Brentons you don't want to meet. What is the matter with them?"

"Oh, nothing," the girl evaded. "It's only that I hate too prompt a rushing into a new acquaintance."

"Not always," her father reminded her. "As a rule, you've been willing enough to meet the new people at the college."

Olive Keltridge's ancestral notions, the notions born of Brahmin and academic New England, spoke in her reply.

"Yes; but they are different."

Her father, though, saw more clearly. He was too well aware of the quality of the raw material whence the growing college faculties must recruit their ranks.

"Not always, Olive; at least, not nowadays, even if it used to be. But what is the matter with Brenton? He seems possible enough."

"Nothing," she confessed, with a little blush for her distinction between man and wife. "It is only Mrs. Brenton. He is very possible, I should say; but she seems to me a--" and Olive laughed at the absurdity of her own coming phrase; "a trifle improbable."

The doctor shook his head.

"I haven't seen her."

"Yes, you have. She was just in front of us, the woman in the pinky-yellow feather and the pompadour. You must remember her; she was casting sheep's-eyes at Mr. Brenton, all the time he was preaching. That was the way I found out who she was. My curiosity led me to ask Dolph Dennison about her, and I was quite upset when Dolph tweaked my elbow and made signals of distress at poor Mr. Brenton who was standing near us. If he is as thin-skinned as he looks, poor man, it must be rather hard to go into a new parish and watch the people getting accustomed to his wife."

"He brought it on himself," the doctor said, with scanty charity.

"And he has also brought it upon us," Olive assented grimly. "Still, if you say so, I will write to Mrs. Dennison that we will come. You'll not forget? In the meantime, I'll raise my eben-ezer of devout thanksgiving that I'm a girl and therefore can't possibly sit next to Mrs. Brenton at the table. I only hope that honour will descend on you."

And it did.

Moreover, in the talk which followed on the being seated, it was Catia who took the initiative. She was affable, as befitted her husband's lofty rank, sprightly, as seemed considerate of the great age of the man beside her. Both attributes were a little bit intensified by her complete pleasure in her frock. It had come by express from New York, that day, ordered by a picture in a catalogue. The box that held it was adorned with a mammoth scarlet star, and the scheme of decoration of the frock was wholly consonant with the star. Catia had ordered it in hot haste, in deference to a rumour which had drifted to her ears, outstretched in readiness for all such rumours, that, even in that relatively small community, it was the custom to put on low-necked frocks for dinner. It was the first time that Catia had worn a low-necked frock; but she did not find it disconcerting in the least. It did disconcert Brenton very much, however. Its abbreviated bodice did not fit in with his notions of what was seemly for a rector's wife; moreover, to the end of time, he never could find any great degree of beauty in a woman's shoulder-blades.

Brenton himself was in his plain clerical costume from which, nowadays, he made it his rule never to depart. It was a slightly different costume from the one he had worn at first, more distinctly clerical. Even in the morning, when it descended to the worldly level of a subdued species of pepper-and-salt, it always opened chiefly in the back, and a plain silver cross invariably dangled from a cord about his neck. As a matter of course, he always kept himself clean-shaven; and his scholarly stoop endured still, although the old, self-distrustful shamble had strengthened into a manly stride. His eyes were as lustrous as of old, his close, up-springing hair lay as thick as ever on his crown; but the lower part of his face showed changes, born of the years. Still lined, still looking just a little worn, it had gained something in decision, gained infinitely more in sensitive refinement. In Scott, the native clay was being replaced by translucent marble. In Catia, it was hardening to something akin to adamant.

That night, Catia wasted but little time in the preliminary conversation with her host who, as a matter of course, had taken her in to dinner. Dennison was older than he looked, less impressed than he seemed, and clothed impeccably. Catia dismissed him as a youngster of scanty account, for he certainly was not formidable to look upon, and her studies in the Napoleonic period had never brought her into close acquaintance with his really epoch-making monograph. To be sure, she had heard some one saying that he golfed extremely well; but as yet her social education was far too rudimentary to allow her mind to grasp all that that fact connoted. Therefore she turned her attention to Doctor Keltridge a thought sooner than the strict laws of table talk allowed. Of Doctor Keltridge she had heard already and often. He was their senior warden, and she the rector's lady; they could not fail to have many points in common. By way of discovering those points quite promptly, Catia turned away from Dennison and ruthlessly cut in upon Doctor Keltridge's amicable sparring with his other neighbour whom, as it chanced, the good doctor had escorted across the portal of this world.

"Oh, Doctor Keltridge!" Catia took great pleasure in the spontaneous accent she contrived to fling into the words. "I do want--"

Startled, and a little bit surprised at the sudden voice above his off-turned shoulder, the doctor bestirred himself and threw out a vaguely searching hand. Then, as his hand found nothing before it but a bank of flowers, he emitted one of the customary growls with which, to his more intimate friends, he disclosed the fact that the motors of his ego were temporarily stalled.

"Never is any butter at such a time!" he grumbled. Then he rallied to the questioning note in Catia's voice. "What else can I get you, madame?" he inquired benignly.

There was an instant's hush about the table. Olive, in the lee of the clerical elbow and with young Dolph Dennison by her side, was palpably in danger of hysterics. The others, all but Brenton, were well enough accustomed to the doctor to await the finish of the interview with no small degree of interest. Brenton felt the pause and reddened a little, more in marital self-consciousness than from any specific sense of conjugal alarm. Indeed, the only two unconscious ones about the table were the two protagonists: Catia and the absent-minded doctor, neither of whom appeared to be in the least aware of any pause in the general talk.

"Nothing at all," Catia told him suavely. "It was only that I wanted--"

Again there came the instant's hesitation. Again the doctor employed that instant in a frenzied search about the table to discover and make good the missing need. This time, though, his success was better. It was with a sigh of unmistakable relief that his fingers shut upon the salt. His gesture crossed the final words of Catia who had resumed her broken phrase, now rounding to a satisfactory conclusion.

"--So much to meet you, Doctor Keltridge. Ever since I heard of you," her eyes looked smilingly into his keen ones which now, a little bit inscrutable, were studying her intently from beneath their bushy brows; "I have told Scott that I felt quite certain that we should find out we had any number of tastes in common."

This time, the pause was not of Catia's making. The doctor let it lengthen while, to all of his old friends about the table, it was plain that the motors of his ego now were working at full speed. Meanwhile, his keen old eyes were still resting upon Catia's up-raised face, and in them was the same look an aged sheepdog might bestow upon a youthful terrier puppy. Then a smile broke over the keen face, and the stern eyes lighted, as the doctor spoke.

"I surely hope so, Mrs. Brenton," he answered her benignantly. "As you see, I like horse radish with my oysters. How is it about you?"

CHAPTER TEN

It was not until a good two weeks later that Olive Keltridge came into any actual contact with the new rector. At the Dennison dinner, she had been too busy in dodging the conversational assaults of the rector's lady to pay any great amount of attention to the rector himself. Since that time, she had viewed Brenton only with the height of the chancel steps between them. However, Olive was conscious that the man interested her, even at that distance; and it was with some degree of impatience that she confessed her interest to young Dolph Dennison who, as a rule, was her safety valve.

"I despise a woman who goes mad about the clergy, Dolph, and I despise the way this new rector-man of ours keeps my eyes glued upon him, all the time he's preaching. It isn't the quality of his sermons, either; it is something inherent in the man himself that causes me to watch him."

Dolph Dennison laughed with the callousness of a wayward boy. He was years younger than his brother, the professor. Moreover, he had never taken any especial pains to expedite the processes of his growing up.

"You'll recover, Olive; I have seen you enthused like this, before. As for Brenton, it's a mere case of burbling genteel platitudes in a marvellous voice. Even I, though I deplore the platitudes, find my own gooseflesh rising in response to his larynx. It's a tremendous asset to a man, that! Some day, when I have the time, I'll work it out into a series of equations: heart and brain and larynx as the unknown quantities to be properly equated, so much brain for so much, or so little, larynx. Thanks, no. I won't come in. I'm late for luncheon now. You will be at the Evans tea, to-morrow afternoon?"

Nodding cheerily, young Dennison went on his way, leaving Olive to ponder upon the accuracy of his diagnosis. Was it only larynx, after all? Or had the new young rector something back of it, something that singled him out from the ruck of men, and held him up as worthy of attention? Olive's eyes grew thoughtful, for an instant, at the question. Then the laugh came back into them again, the while she thought of Mrs. Brenton.

It was only the next afternoon that Brenton came by appointment to call on Doctor Keltridge. There were certain minor matters to be discussed between the rector and his senior warden, before it appeared really wise to bring them up in open meeting. To both men, it seemed possible to discuss them with greater freedom from interruption at the doctor's house than at the rectory. Therefore had been the appointment between them.

According to his custom, Brenton kept his appointment to the very letter, and the clocks were striking three, when the Keltridge maid deposited him in the Keltridge drawing-room. The doctor showed himself less punctual, however, and a good quarter of an hour elapsed before steps were heard in the hall outside. Moreover, before Brenton had time to question to himself the weight of those same steps, the door was pushed open to admit, not a keen-faced and grizzly doctor, but a totally apologetic Olive.

"Mr. Brenton?" she said, with a slight lift, as of question, in her voice. "Really, I am so penitent at the message I am bringing you. The maid told me you were here. Then, after a while, she came back again and told me she couldn't find my father anywhere."

With a courteous little gesture, Brenton interrupted her apology and half rose from his chair.

"Really, it's not at all a matter for apology, Miss Keltridge. I can come again, some other day. Your father is a busy man, I know."

But Olive stayed him with scanty ceremony.

"No; wait, Mr. Brenton. I hadn't finished my tale. Besides, when you have lived in town a little longer, you'll know that nobody ever does apologize for my father; we all revel in his dear old absurdities. Sit down, please. He will be here before very long."

Brenton did sit down, the while he suppressed a vague question regarding the filial nature of the word _absurdities_. Then he yielded to the merriment in Olive's eyes, and laughed outright and boyishly.

"I've heard something of the sort already, Miss Keltridge," he confessed. "What was it, this time?"

For an instant, Olive paused, astonished at the change which had come over her companion. His clerical veneer had fallen from him; the man beneath was singularly human, likable, and as simple as Dolph Dennison himself.

"This time? I went to see, went to the laboratory, though the maid had told me he wasn't in there. She had knocked twice; then she had opened the door to look in. At first, I agreed with her. Then I heard a little noise, over in a corner behind the table. There on the floor, the flat floor, sat my father, sixty-five years old. His hair was all on end, and his cheek was smudged with something yellow, and he was as happy as a baby in a sand pile. Doing?" Olive made a helpless little gesture. "How should I know? I'm no student of germs. He had a row of glass pans in front of him, with hideous messes in them, and he appeared to be sounding the depths of iniquity in them with a small glass divining rod."

Then their eyes met above the finished story, and together the two of them burst out laughing, like a pair of merry children.

"You think he will become visible, in course of time?" Brenton asked her.

She shook her head, as she laughed again.

"I trust so, Mr. Brenton; but, of course, nobody ever can predict. He knows you are here. At least," swiftly she amended her phrase; "he did know it. How long the fact stays by him is another question. If you were only a germ, now----" She surveyed him dubiously. "You wouldn't care to go into the laboratory?" she asked him.

A sudden light flashed up into Scott Brenton's face, the dazzle of a flame long buried, never entirely to be extinguished.

"If I might! Wouldn't it disturb him, though?"

But Olive had seen the lighting of the quiet face, and her curiosity was aroused. What was there in the mere mention of a laboratory that could so transform a humdrum little rector into a thing of fire? That it was the laboratory, Olive never stopped to question. She was far too sane, too used to the tame-tabby-cat propensities of youthful rectors, to imagine for a moment that the enthusiasm had come out of the chance to escape from her society. Therefore she decided that, for the present, she would keep this particular rector to herself, on the off-chance of discovering the real source of his enthusiasm. Her knowledge of her father's habits assured her, beyond doubt, that later on, much later, there would still be plenty of time for the laboratory visit. Accordingly, she answered Brenton's question with flat discouragement.

"Probably," she told him quite uncompromisingly. "However, it is good for him to be disturbed, once in a while, even if he doesn't always take it so very nicely."

With palpable regret, Brenton settled back again in his chair.

"Oh, well, I'd hate to be disturbing him," he said politely.

"Better stay here and wait," Olive advised him. "It can't be long before he comes, and some of those glass pans were very awful."

"Do you think so? One never really minds a laboratory smell, after the first whiff of it. It seems to go into the system once for all, at the start. After," this time, the regret was even more palpable; "one always rather longs to get back into it."

Olive smiled.

"So I have noticed, with my father." Then her accent changed, grew less conventional. "You have had it, then, Mr. Brenton?"

"Of another sort. I had three years in a chemical laboratory, when I was in college," he told her simply.

"Really? And you liked it?"

His voice dropped by a whole octave, thrilled with a new resonance which, for some reason that she could not analyze then or after, set the girl's nerves all a-quiver. It was the voice of a man who, for the first time, is confessing aloud his master passion.

"It made life over for me," he said gravely.

"Then--Forgive me, if I have no right to ask the question. But one generally keeps on with a thing like that." Olive was painfully aware that her curiosity, however she wrapped it up in apologies, was most unjustifiable.

Scott Brenton, however, did not appear to find it so. Too simple-minded and downright to obtrude his personal history, he also was too simple-minded to conceal it.

"I should have kept on with it, at any cost," he answered; "only for the sake of my mother. She was a widow without much money; she was giving all she had to educate me, and her heart was set on--something else."

If Olive noted the little pause, she had at least the super-feminine tact to ignore it.

"Your priesthood?"

He nodded slowly.

"After a fashion,--yes."

This time, the pause seemed to her entirely natural.

"She must be very happy now," she answered. "Saint Peter's is a dear old church, mellow enough in its traditions to make up for its hopelessly new architecture; and I am sure you'll love this sleepy town."

But it was plain to her that Brenton, quite oblivious to her words, was pursuing his own train of thought. Out of it he spoke.

"My mother died, two years ago, Miss Keltridge."

Her reply came promptly.

"How glad you must be that she lived to know that her wishes had been carried out!"

This time, the pause was a good deal longer. Without Olive's in the least suspecting it, the invincible honour of the man before her was struggling with his reticence. Should he absorb a praise to which he had no right; or should he thrust his confidence upon her at this early stage of their acquaintance? Honour won out.

"Only in part," he said a little sadly. "Really, Miss Keltridge, there's no especial reason I should bore you with all this, except that I don't like to be caught, sailing under false colours. I wanted to be a chemist of some sort or other, something experimental and theoretical, if I could; and they told me that I could. Sometimes I wish they hadn't. It would have simplified things a good deal, if I never had found it out. And my mother, all the time, had been denying herself in order to prepare me to preach the bluest sort of Calvinism. I found that it was going to break her heart, if I gave up the plan, so I gave up the chemistry, instead, and took the preaching. Unfortunately, though, in the meantime, the chemistry--and some other things--had made me also give up the Calvinism. And so, in the end of all things, even my preaching seemed to her a wretched compromise."

His eyes were fixed upon the carpet, and he could not see her face; but the gentleness in her young voice set his pulses pounding. In all his life up to this hour, such gentleness never had been meant for him. His mother was too stern; Catia too metallic. As for other women, he had never been in sufficiently short range of them, psychologically speaking, to be aware whether they meant to be gentle to him or not.

"I think," Olive was saying; "that she understands it better now. Anyway, you always will be glad of the choice you made."

His eyes still on the carpet at his feet, Scott Brenton spoke moodily.

"I wish I knew," he said.

And then he was aghast at the consciousness that, before this comparative stranger, and a girl at that, he had taken down the barriers before the secret of his disappointment.

Happily, however, Olive was serenely unconscious of either barriers or secret. Instead, she was intent on preventing any retro-active regrets upon the part of a devoted son.

"All creeds are a good deal alike, just as they say all roads lead to Rome," she reminded him, with a curious crossing of Mrs. Brenton's mental trail. "The preaching, after all, is the main thing, that and the priestly life; it doesn't make much difference whether you wear a stole, or a gown and bands. And as for the chemistry," she laughed lightly; "if you ever feel your work in that was wasted, just go and talk to the head professor here. Only just the other day, I heard him laying down the law to father, claiming that his laboratory was the only open door to logic, the only training school where one can find out whether his elements can be combined safely, or whether they will explode and, what's a good deal more to the point, explode him with them."

The laugh came back to Brenton's face. Once more Olive wondered at its charm.

"There's something in his theory," he admitted.

"Everything, according to his notion. The last I heard, the dear man apparently was trying to get himself annexed to the literary courses. He declared in open faculty meeting, the other day, that a proper training in chemistry would kill off a good fifty per cent of the modern novels. The authors would realize the explosiveness of their plots before they touched them, and wouldn't waste months on months of work, brewing what, in the end of it all, was nothing more than a mere flash in the pan. He was still elaborating his theory, when the President called him to order, ready for the motion to adjourn." Then she harked back to her former theme. "You must see the laboratory here, Mr. Brenton, if you care for such things. Girls? Oh, yes, of course; but you'll soon get past regarding that as any handicap. In fact, according to Professor Opdyke, it is one of the best equipped laboratories in the country."

But Brenton's attention had wandered from the fact, caught by one of the minor details which surrounded it.

"Professor Opdyke?" he echoed a little blankly.

"Yes. You have met him?"

"Not here. Not at all, in fact. The name is so uncommon that I am quite sure. And yet--"

It was plain to Olive that Brenton was struggling with some half-forgotten memory, striving to bring it forth to light, to link it with the present; or, failing that, at least with something tangible in his past life. And yet, the blurring of his memory was not too inexplicable. Reed Opdyke still remembered Brenton clearly, still regretted the apparent waste of some of his more brilliant possibilities. Scott Brenton, on the other hand, had totally dismissed Reed Opdyke from his mind. In the contact between the two of them, the one had stepped up, the other down; and, as so often happens, the truer, the more lasting picture is the one gained from the upper level. Moreover, Brenton's later life, and most especially the summer which had followed the ending of his association with Reed Opdyke, had been so very strenuous as to obliterate by far the greater number of his earlier contacts.

Then suddenly memory stirred in its sleep, stretched itself, awakened.

"Did Professor Opdyke have a son?" he asked, with a new eagerness which was wholly alien to the one concerning his bit of autobiography.

Olive smiled at his phrasing.

"He did; I trust he still does," she answered; "though, with a mining man, one never can be quite sure. Why? Did you know Reed?"

The colour came into Brenton's cheeks, as he blurted out the totally forgotten truth.

"I adored him, all my last two years at college."

"Really? Yes, he is Professor Opdyke's son; and people who have seen him lately tell me he is more adorable than ever."

"When have you seen him?" For something in Olive's accent made Brenton realize that there was no necessity for any preliminary question concerning the fact that she knew Opdyke well.

"Not since the year of his graduation. In fact, I was at his commencement. Why," and suddenly her eyes gathered into focus; "I remember you then, Mr. Brenton. Reed showed you to me as----" Then, all at once, she faltered and her colour came.

He strove to help her out of the abyss into which she so unwittingly had fallen.

"One of the waiters at his eating club, and popularly known there as 'Reed's Parson'?" he asked her, with a little smile which sought to cover the sting that came to him with the memory.

But Olive shook her head.

"No; not that at all. It was one of the Might-Have-Beens, he called you," she said, with brave downrightness. But, afterwards, when she thought the matter over, she wondered whether she had bettered it, or made it worse. In any case, she went on a little hastily. "Since then, as it happens, I never once have been here, when Reed has been at home. Of course, he has been back here now and then; but once I was in London, and in New York, the other times."

"Where is he?"

She shook her head again.

"That is the hardest sort of question to answer, for he is always on the wing. He went in for mining engineering, and is making quite a record as consulting engineer. It's copper, I think, he consults about; anyway, no one ever can predict where he will be heard from next. Really, if you knew him, you must meet Professor Opdyke. The dear old man is bursting with pride in his only son; he talks about him by the hour at a time, if we let him. The trouble is that we all are so cloyed with hearing about Reed's virtues and Reed's triumphs that we have a tendency to run away before the paternal downpour commences. A new pair of ears will be a veritable godsend to his father. He and my father are the greatest sort of chums, and--" Suddenly Olive paused and began to look distinctly uneasy. "By the way, Mr. Brenton, where is my father? I really think that, in mercy to your patience, I'd better go and jog his memory once more."

And jog his memory she did, and with such success that, this time, Doctor Keltridge put in a tardy and apologetic appearance. However, when, smiling guiltily at his own sins of omission, he came to greet his guest, he came alone. Olive, her hospitable duty done, had vanished, to return no more.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Saint Peter's Parish was unique in all New England. The trails of old and new in its experience crossed and crisscrossed at every point, causing a long succession of eccentricities which endeared themselves to the minds of the oldest inhabitants. However, even the oldest inhabitants breathed a deep sigh of relief, when finally they were housed in the brand-new church up beside the college campus, a real stone church, with transepts and painted windows and choir-stalls within, and a cloister and a grand tall tower without. The ramshackle old wooden church had been dear to them, had even remained dear to them after the railroad had laid down its tracks under their very eaves; but they were fretted by the crudely caustic comments of strangers coming to the town, and they were still more fretted when the puffing, screeching Sunday trains drowned the voice of the good old rector whose mannerly traditions forbade his puffing and screeching in his turn.

He had been a dear old rector, rotund and pompous; and his surplice had been fully as long and voluminous as a Mother Hubbard nightie. Possibly it was on that account, to equalize the demand for muslin, that, in those same old days, the choir had worn no surplices at all, but had been accustomed to come tramping into church in all the bravery of sack coats and violent haberdashery. Indeed, upon the part of certain of the congregation, there had been a tendency to regard it as a finger-post to Rome, when some younger member of the vestry suggested putting the ban on scarlet neckties. Saint Peter's Parish was set like a holy beacon in the very midst of a valley which was tainted with heresies Arian and unspeakable, tainted so thoroughly that the ritualistic development of Saint Peter's was delayed for decades upon that account.

Later, Saint Peter's became far wiser in its generation. Its policy had been to extend a cordial welcome to all men of whatever creed, and its early fathers had felt that it was surer to attract the more unstable of its neighbours, if it held its threshold at the common level of them all. In course of time, however, wisdom dawned and broadened to a perfect day of psychological common sense. A theological reaction, of whatever sort, was bound in the last analysis to be a matter of a sudden leap, not of a deliberate slide. One either took a veritable ski-jump into the next church but three, or else one merely stayed where one was, and fretted about the details of the service.

It was now a good twenty years and more since Saint Peter's had abandoned its old barracks of a church and moved up town into its new quarters. As a matter of course, it had settled down as close as possible to the campus. A student congregation might be a bit unstable, taken as a parish; but it was distinctly lucrative, when it came to the point of counting up the offertory. Furthermore, as result of its Sunday-morning habits of arising, it was prone to turn in at the first church door that offered.

Nowadays on Sunday mornings, Saint Peter's rector had no monopoly of surplices. The choir, discreetly garbed and outwardly reverential, warbled early English settings to the hymns, the while they came striding slowly up the aisle in a species of churchly goose-step that demanded a pause on each foot, to prevent the physical march outrunning the musical one. Nowadays, too, there was daily celebration; that is, when any one was sufficiently energetic to get up and get into church in time. What happened upon those other days, when the rector was abandoned to the rows of empty pews, was still a matter of profane conjecture. Discussed in whispers, it was agreed to be a subject best left to the disclosing hand of time.

Into this elaborate and decorative harness, Scott Brenton was now breaking his young strength, his young ambition. In his old parish in the hills, it had been a question of preaching the best sermons that he could and looking out for his people in the intervals, rather than of forms and ceremonies and intonations of the Nicene Creed. In accepting the Bishop's intimation that Saint Peter's Parish would extend to him a welcoming hand, he had thought singularly little about the outward trappings of his priesthood. Catia knew it all; but she held her peace. The Bishop also had held his peace, and a little bit for the same reason that Catia had done. He knew the theological history of Scott Brenton; he knew that, like all half-broken colts, he easily might shy at first sight of the harness; yet, once with the harness on and fitted to his back, he would fall to work in earnest and pull steadily with the best of them. And it was the pulling that the Bishop wished, not the mere jingling of the farthingale. Under the last incumbent, Saint Peter's had been running down a little. It was not in all respects an easy parish; and Brenton, young, earnest and as magnetic as he was self-distrustful, was the very man to build it up. Nevertheless, the Bishop saw to it that Scott Brenton should never attend a service at Saint Peter's, until his acceptance of the parish was settled past all gainsaying.

From the first morning of his reading service at Saint Peter's, Brenton had been aware that he was opening a fresh chapter of his life. In the old hillside parish, there had been things to do and souls to save. Here, it seemed to him that all the souls had been saved prenatally. As for the things to do, these people were too critical, too self-reliant to take kindly to the intimate sort of ministrations in which, of old, he had delighted. For the future, it would be the quality of his sermons that counted most, rather than his personal contact with his people.

The congregation seemed to him conglomerate, a jumble of conflicting elements. There were the old, old residents and their offspring, people who squabbled violently among themselves as to whose ancestor came aboard the _Mayflower_ first, and which in what capacity. There were the mediæval spinsters who always reach their best development in the semi-small New England town, spinsters who have clubs and theories, and yet play golf, and frivol delightfully above their luncheon tables. And there were college girls in hordes, alert young things, critical alike of evil and of good, of the hang of the back of a surplice where the shoulders stoop a little, and of the turning of the final phrases that naturally lead up to the _And now_--To Scott Brenton, looking down upon the students in the congregation, his first Sunday morning at Saint Peter's, their befeathered hats and their intent young faces seemed to him the masking labels upon a store of frozen dynamite. Thawed, it might serve for any amount of useful tunneling; it might go off explosively in the open, at almost any given instant.

Taken all in all, it was upon the student fraction of his congregation that Brenton looked with greatest interest; it was to them, in greatest measure, that the best of his sermons preached themselves. The phrase is no slipshod inversion of the fact. The best of all sermons do preach themselves, both in their original inception and their ultimate delivery. All the so-called preacher does about it is to give the intermediate polishing to his projectile, and then to hold himself still, while it is going off, and watch what happens, by way of preparation for aiming his next shot.

As a matter of course, with a target so unstable as a student audience, Brenton by no means hit the bull's-eye every time. That he did hit it occasionally, however, argues no mean ability, no paltry knowledge of youthful human nature. Over their Sunday dinners, the girls discussed his sermons with increasing vigour. The echoes of these discussions, coming to Brenton's ears, set him to preaching with increasing conscientiousness. However, there still was salvation for him; it was his sermons that he took so much in earnest, and not himself, the preacher.

But, although it was upon his student hearers that Scott Brenton tossed down, broadcast and unsaving, the best of all he had within himself, it was among the permanent residents of Saint Peter's that his real work was supposed to be done. He did that work most faithfully; he showed himself both tireless and tactful in his arrangement of the parish mechanism, in his gathering up and straightening and knotting here and there the threads his predecessor had flung down in a tangled heap. Nevertheless, his heart was in the other end of his work, not for any individual interest in the different girls; but because his whole instinct told him that here was the dynamic force of the whole organization, that the rest of it was curiously static. Under those befeathered hats were eager brains which weighed their theology and measured it, not took it ready made. It was for him to serve it out to them in such a guise that, weighed, they should not find it wanting.

Catia, on the other hand, looked upon the student end of her husband's parish with disapproving eyes. The girls annoyed her by their cocksure alertness, their little air of being primed, ready for any emergency that chanced to offer. They vexed her by their manifest absorption in her husband; they vexed her yet more by their inexplicable lack of interest in herself.

Upon the older and more stable fraction of the parish, however, Catia lavished an interested affection which would have seemed well-nigh maternal, had it not been for the care she took to emphasize the gulf in age which yawned between herself and certain of the individuals who made up its list. She studied the list with no slight degree of care. By the end of their first month in the new parish, she knew to a nicety how the line of local social precedence ordered itself, where, at any point in the procession, town must yield to gown, or the reverse. She knew the lineage and history of all the wardens and their wives, and then of all the vestry-men; she even cultivated a nodding acquaintance with their family skeletons, and learned to recognize the seals upon the doors that, as a rule, hid them from public view. She knew the hobbies of the average prosperous member at large of the flock ecclesiastical, and made a series of elaborate calculations regarding the intersecting social orbits of those same members. As for the other, lesser members of the congregation, she had an especial kind of smile, half of sweetness, half of deprecation, that she bestowed upon each one of them in turn; but she never made the slightest effort to separate them, one from another, in her mind, or to return any of their calls. To Catia's astute brain, the duty of a rector's lady consisted in helping her husband up, not on.

It was at about this epoch, too, that Catia ceased to be Catia and became Kathryn. In some respects, the most remarkable thing about the change was the suddenness with which it was announced to Scott.

A dozen of them had been dining at the Keltridges', one night, six months or so after Brenton had come to take charge of the congregation of Saint Peter's. It was essentially a church-warden kind of dinner, with all the other wardens and their wives to meet the rector and his lady, the kind of dinner that one gives and goes to, out of stern necessity, when, all the time, one longs for something just a little less made up by rule of thumb. The one exception to the prevailing ecclesiastical flavour, that night, was in the person of a local novelist who, albeit suave and very bald, wrote novels of the raucous, woolly West. Moreover, like all other novelists, he rejoiced in talking shop. Accordingly, with the utmost expedition, he dragged the talk around to the law regarding the choice of names.

"Of course," he expounded, for the benefit of whom it might concern; "the first thing I always do, when I go to work, is to name my characters. It's the hardest thing in the world to do--properly. You can stick any sort of name to any sort of character, I know; but that's not naming them. Not at all. The name must be a label; it must fit like a glove, and yet the character must be fitted to it. And most of the names I find are so trite."

"Likewise the characters," Dolph Dennison assured him, _sotto voce_.

Dolph, by way of his older brother, who was vestryman, might be termed sub-ecclesiastical. However, in any case, he would have been sure of a seat at the Keltridge dinner, even if all the other guests had been archbishops. It needs at least one such irresponsible youngster to act as appetizer for the solid things before him.

Only Olive heard his comment. As a matter of course, Dolph's place was next to Olive. Long since, discerning hostesses had discovered that therein lay the only path to peace. Otherwise, Dolph either sulked palpably; or else ignored his other neighbour and shouted all his talk across the table into Olive's ears. Not that either Dolph or Olive had any notion of being at all in love with each other. It was merely that things struck them the same way at the same instant, and that Dolph, being young and a good deal spoiled, could see no reason against a prompt exchange of comments on the fact. Therefore, for the peace of the other people at the table, it had become a universal local law that, no matter who took Olive Keltridge out, Dolph Dennison should be placed at her other side.

Olive, then, heard Dolph's comment and, what was infinitely worse, she feared the novelist had heard it, too. Therefore, to save the feelings of the bald little man, she flung herself into the talk.

"I see exactly what you mean," she told him. "Your idea is that, when you have conceived a character that is wholly original--"

"Ahem!" Dolph strangled suddenly.

But Olive continued, without pause for flinching, for now the bald little novelist was facing her intently, and it was plain, from the tentative waggling of his beard, that he would mount his hobby and be off again, if she gave him so much as a comma's breadth by which to creep back into the talk.

"Wholly original," she repeated sternly; "that it must be very trying to be obliged to descend to the every day of things, and name her Mamie."

There came a peal of laughter at the accent with which Olive had contrived to endow the name. The peal was cut short, however, by the fussy accent of the little novelist.

"You have hit the nail on the head, Miss Olive, distinctly on the head," he assured her, with a bow and smile so suave as to be devoid of meaning. "Really," and Olive felt as if she were a young child and he were offering her a stick of candy; "it was a very smart little tap. Yes, as you say, a Mamie is an anticlimax to one's best endeavours. Now, if all the ladies," Olive had a momentary longing to hurl a plate in his unctuous direction; "only were blessed with names like yours, we poor novelists would never be devoid of sources for our inspiration."

"Encore!" remarked Dolph Dennison, with admirable gravity.

Once again Olive sought to save the situation, as well as to remove the subject of the talk from resting solely on herself.

"If that is all you want," she answered lightly; "you surely will find Mrs. Brenton's name offering you all sorts of inspiration, much better than anything mine could give."

"Mrs. Brenton?" The little novelist was palpably uncertain as to whom the name belonged. He was not only Unitarian by theology, but inattentive by profession; and, moreover, he had but just returned from a copy-hunting trip in the direction of his raucous West.

"Yes." Olive made signals of distress in the direction of the rector's wife who was bending above her salad, with every appearance of anxious absorption in her tour of discovery among its elements. Her colour betrayed her, though, and Olive judged it would be the part of wisdom to drag her by the heels into the talk. "Mrs. Brenton, I am just telling Mr. Prather what a benefactor you ought to be considered, according to his notion about names. Surely, yours is unusual enough to win his full approval."

Even as she spoke, Olive realized the vapidness of her words and was ashamed of them. An instant later, though, her shame exchanged itself for astonishment.

The rector's lady raised her brows, and spoke with studied carelessness.

"Really, Miss Keltridge," she said calmly; "there is nothing so very unusual in the name of Kathryn."

"Kathryn!" Olive fairly stuttered over her reply, for she saw Scott Brenton's eyes turn to his wife, and she read amazement in them, amazement and something else that was dangerously akin to contempt. "I thought your name was Catia, Mrs. Brenton."

But Kathryn Brenton laid down her fork, as though the salad had ceased to interest her. Then she spoke, and her accent conveyed the same impression as concerned the conversation.

"Oh, no; Catia is just a little nickname. That is all. My name is really Kathryn."

And then, for an instant and to her lasting shame, Olive Keltridge's glance sought that of Brenton. Before the hurt and abased look in his deep gray eyes, her own eyes dropped, ashamed and pitiful. What right had she, in a moment so tragic, albeit so very, very petty, to spy upon him in his disappointment? What right to obtrude her honest sympathy upon his secret pain?

She dropped her eyes, then, promptly. None the less, Scott Brenton realized that, alone of all the group about the table, Olive Keltridge had recognized both elements: the secret, and the pain.

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was Catia, then, or, rather, Kathryn, who kept a weather eye upon the social powers of the parish. Brenton was too busy doing other things. Somebody, though, she argued, must look out for the personal end of life, as well as for the theological. Else, the parish would fall to pieces about their ears. Brenton might be giving them the bread of life; but man should not live by bread alone. He needed an occasional cup of afternoon tea to wash it down. Therefore Kathryn revised her social balance sheets often and with the utmost care.

Out of deference to what Kathryn was still pleased to term her husband's cloth, the Brentons promptly had been received into the inmost circles of the college set, an honour which they shared with Prather, the fussy little novelist. Kathryn liked the novelist; he was such an unctuous, eager little man, so redolent of the elements that went into his careful grooming. She even tried in vain to read his novels; but they proved too much for her. She explained to him that his local colour was so brilliant that it dazzled her; but the ignoble truth was that she found it boring, although her letters going out of town were splashed thickly with his name.

At the faculty wives Kathryn looked askance. They most of them knew things and they wore their clothes as if they were accustomed to them. Nevertheless, they seemed to her a little bit old-fashioned. Some of the grown-up daughters, the ones who had not been in college, she liked a little better. Nevertheless, Kathryn's attempts at closest comradeship were with certain of the young instructors. She told herself that she was mothering them, giving their homeless selves an outlook on domestic life. What the young instructors told, would be better for the editing. Indeed, it was somewhat edited and pruned of its finest flowers of speech, out of loyalty to Brenton whom they one and all admired exceedingly.

Brenton himself, meanwhile, though liking those jovial youngsters who, in reality, were of his age and epoch, was finding his most satisfying intimacy in the friendship of two of the older men: Doctor Eustace Keltridge, and Professor Opdyke.

Of the two of them, both mellow men of learning and of kindly humour, Doctor Keltridge was easily first choice. Before Scott Brenton had been a month over Saint Peter's Parish, he had fallen into the habit of dropping in upon the doctor at all sorts of hours and upon all sorts of pretexts, now smoking with him in the library and discussing things ecclesiastical, now following him into the laboratory, to hang above the trays of cultures, or the charts of perverse fever cases, while the doctor expounded and predicted, laying down the law with voice and fist and trenchant word. He saw Olive, as a rule, when he was passing in and out. Sometimes they merely nodded from afar, sometimes they had a little conversation. It was always as immaterial as possible, yet it never failed to have a little flavour of personal and friendly understanding.

Next to the absent-minded and erratic doctor, Brenton's loyalty was given to Professor Opdyke. At the very first, the consciousness that the gray-haired professor was father to his old-time idol had made all the difference; but, after a time, that fact sank into insignificance beside the personality of the man himself. Never was any artist more devoted to his medium, whether that medium were water colours or progressive harmonies, than was Professor Opdyke to his balances and his blow-pipes, to his effervescent mixtures and to his most unholy smells. His laboratory was his studio, a place apart from all the outside world, the threshold where he was content to stand and knock, waiting in perfect, reverential patience until the mysterious door ahead of him should open just a very little wider. To the outward eye, he was languid, indifferent, a little cynical and prone to boredom. Underneath it, though, the fires of his enthusiasm, of his ambition to advance, not his own career, but the sum total of scientific knowledge: this fire was burning at white heat. Indeed, it cost him something to bank down the flame upon the side of his nature which lay open to the general view. His somewhat cynical humour was the material which he selected for the banking.

Professor Opdyke almost never was betrayed into the sin of talking shop. Upon the rare occasions that he gave himself the privilege, save to his classes, he insisted upon but one congenial hearer, and that that one should be with him behind closed doors. More and more often, as the second winter of his acquaintance with Brenton went on, he chose Brenton as the one hearer he allowed himself. This was partly by reason of Brenton's interest in Reed, for, whatever his habit with his chemistry, it must be confessed that Professor Opdyke talked in season and out about his son. Partly, too, it came by way of Professor Mansfield whose introduction of Brenton would have been the _Open, Sesame_ to any sanctum in America. Most of all, though, it came from Brenton himself, from the young rector's manifest enthusiasm for all that went under the name of chemistry, an enthusiasm based, as Professor Opdyke made prompt discovery, upon no mere smattering of knowledge.

Bit by bit, then, the professor lowered the guard he had built up before his holy places, relaxed the vigilance of his watch upon them lest they should be invaded by the careless feet of those that did not comprehend. Scott Brenton did comprehend. To him, experimenting was an act of reverence, not a deed of idle curiosity. The world-laws were, to him, full of purpose, albeit only half revealed; and blessed was he who should assist in the revealing.

Brenton, listening, talking in his turn, sometimes questioning, sometimes uttering a trenchant bit of argument, felt the old impulses stirring within him, felt the old love of science renewing its hold upon his heart and brain. Not that he regretted his holy calling; at least, not yet. It was a goodly privilege to be allowed to set forth to all men the modern, elastic gospel of good will coupled with a bowing acquaintance with the sciences. Much might be done, that way, he told himself, while steadily he disregarded the voices whispering in his ears that he was offering his parishioners a set of pretty painted toys instead of the rugged, vital facts of universal law. Still, the toys were prettier and vastly more refined than were the old-time goblins of his mother's day, the goblins marched to and fro persistently by half a score of Parson Wheelers in their time. Those were monstrosities, palpably of human creation and yet in the likeness of no mortal thing. The toys he offered to his people were at least shaped and coloured into dainty imitation of existing facts. So far as he helped on the substitution, he was a benefactor to all mankind. And yet, it would have been good to bare his hands and arms, and with them grasp and wrestle with the naked facts, elusive facts, despite their ruggedness. Nevertheless, he bravely smothered his desires. He even, and to himself, professed to ignore the way they multiplied, after an afternoon in the society of Professor Opdyke. However, ignore them as he would and did, they burnt within him with an increasing fierceness, burnt away, indeed, some of the scaffolding upon which his system of theology had reared itself.

More than a little of this conflagration the professor realized. Also he realized its potential danger. If the scaffolding began to go, what then? Would the flames blaze up all the higher on the heap of fallen ruins; or would the ice water which, in the Parson Wheelers, had taken the place of good red blood, spurt from the veins of this, their latter-day descendant, and quench the fires before they reached the superstructure of his faith? The professor realized to the full, moreover, his personal accountability in the matter. None the less, he could never quite decide where the real right lay. Should he ignore the possible loss to science or should he help on the probable loss to theologic eloquence? He shook his head at the question. Like all true scientists, he must hold himself impartial. Asked, however, he surely had no moral right to withhold facts from a mature mind like that of Scott Brenton. Facts he would give, and plainly, and without modification or omission. There, though, he would stop. The inferences which Brenton should draw out from them should be no concern of his.

And Scott Brenton who, from the start, had had a trick of drawing inferences to suit himself, was all the better pleased on that account.

By degrees, then, the intimacy between the two men waxed strong. The one imparted things; the other absorbed them greedily. As time went on, there were few days in the week which did not find them together at some hour and place or other: in the laboratory, in the rector's study at the church, on the golf links, or scouring the hill and valley roads that stretched out, a lovely network to enmesh the town.

One such walk had been scheduled for a day in April, a day when the whole physical world is a fragrant commentary on the truths of resurrection. The professor, it had been agreed, should call for Brenton at two. At half-past two, he had not appeared; and Brenton, loath to lose his half-day in the open, set out in search of him.

As a matter of course, the search began in the outer laboratory where, in all probability, the professor had been hindered by a student grappling either with conscience or a condition, perhaps, indeed, with both combined. Such things had happened more than once in Brenton's experience of the department. The fact that it was a girls' college, though, made the earlier alternative more probable than was the later one. Brenton smiled a little, as he thanked his lucky stars that it was not the custom of the college girls to haunt their spiritual pilots as insistently as some of them haunted their mental ones. Smiling still, he doffed his hat before the dozen girls in the outer laboratory, while he looked about him. Professor Opdyke was not there. After an instant's hesitation, Brenton crossed the intervening strip of floor and tapped upon the door leading to the private laboratory beyond.

"Come in."

The voice was more than a trifle husky; and the professor's chair was carefully planted with its high back to the light. The professor was in the chair, and bent above the table which, Brenton's quick eye noted, was bare of anything that looked like work. As Brenton's face appeared in the doorway, Professor Opdyke looked up at him in a vague uncertainty which all at once changed to a guilty recognition.

"Brenton! I quite forgot. I'm very sorry," he said; but his voice lacked all resonance. "The fact is, I've had news from Reed."

"Bad?" The curt monosyllable was kinder than many words.

The professor nodded.

"There's been an accident."

"He's not--" Brenton faltered at the grisly word, not so much in mercy to the father, seated there before him, as because the old-time love for that father's son seemed to rise up and catch him by the throat and strangle him.

The Professor gave a long, shuddering sigh, the sigh of a woman verging on hysterics.

"No; not that--yet. They'll wire again, to-night, they tell me."

"When did you hear?"

"Just now. An hour ago. His mother doesn't know it yet. Brenton, I've got to tell her." And the professor turned a wan, appealing face up to the younger man, as though in search of help.

"Yes." The single word fell heavily. "You must." But Brenton, even while he was speaking, shut his teeth upon the thought. Then the priest within him rallied to the need, although the latent man of science in him forbade him to accompany the rallying with many words. "Can I be of any help?"

"If you feel you could go to the house with me, Brenton. You knew Reed."

Brenton's alert ear caught the unconscious change of tense. He interrupted with a question.

"Just how bad is it?"

"I don't know. 'Badly hurt', the telegram says. 'Will wire again in a few hours'. I suppose it's the same old story: an explosive and a panic. Somebody probably tried to stir a fire with a stick of frozen dynamite, or some such foolery as that." The scorn in the words came from the effort at self-mastery. Then the professor rose and looked about him vaguely for his hat. When he had found it, "Come along," he bade Brenton shortly. "We've got to get it over, even if it kills her. I believe in anæsthetics and hypnosis in such a case as this: drugging the victim and then impressing on him that he has always known the trouble and that it's certain to come out all right in time. Well, are you coming?" The voice sharpened again in its impatience to have the bad hour over.

Out in the street and walking rapidly towards home, the professor spoke once more. This time, there was no sharpness, but rather the same note of appeal which Brenton had heard a little earlier.

"Brenton, it's your chance now. I've been showing you the best of all my science. Now, for God's sake, give me back the best of your religion. In a time like this, science can't help us much. It shows us all the worst of things, and shuts down before whatever best there is. If your religion is any good at all, now is the time we need to make it count. Else, what's its use?"

Before the unexpected, swift appeal, Brenton was dumb. What was the use, especially to a man like Professor Opdyke? It was all very well to talk about Reed's being safe in his Maker's hands, when common sense and science alike were insisting upon it that it was in all probability the hands of the surgeon who could rescue him from peril; that much less depended upon prayer than on the sterilizing processes. Of course, no one, however scientific, could deny the Master's law at the back of everything; but that law was a trifle too remote to be a potent source of comfort to a quivering mind. Besides, when, in all probability, it was that same law, either in breach or in observance, which had caused the trouble, it seemed a little bit unmerciful to brandish the cause as an instrument of healing.

After all, in such a case as this, what was religion good for? One believed things, but only so far as they were based on law; and law is a stiff sort of moral plaster to apply to a bleeding wound. Of course, there was an infinite array of platitudes, phrased to fit every sort of emergency known to man. However, in a crisis such as this, it seemed to Brenton something little short of deliberate insult to offer a platitude to a man of Professor Opdyke's sort. All he could find to do, then, was to stand by and hold himself and them quite steady.

And stand by steadily he did, all through that interminable April afternoon while the sun came sifting down through the elm buds, to throw irrelevant golden splashes across their gloom; while the merry voices of the college girls, passing by in the street outside, came floating in across their waiting silence. There was nothing in the world that he could do, except to be there and, now and then, to stave off a caller too insistent to be appeased by any bulletin issued by the maid. Among those callers was Prather, the novelist. Priest though he was, Brenton was conscious of a human and athletic wish to wring his neck, so palpably was his expression of fussy sympathy mingled with the professional sense of copy latent in the situation.

And at last, when twilight had dulled the sunshine and sent the chattering, laughing college girls home to supper, a messenger boy came to the door to bring a yellow envelope.

Professor Opdyke tore it open. Then, forgetful of his science,--

"Thank God!" he said quite simply, as he read the message to his wife.

Next morning early, Brenton went to them again. He found them taking breakfast with good appetite, while they made an infinite variety of plans for the home-coming of the invalid. There had been two more telegrams, the previous evening, and a night letter had followed them. To Brenton, however, the particulars seemed glorious rather than reassuring. Instead of the fire stirred with a stick of dynamite, there had been something infinitely more deadly. A careless blast, set off by an inexperienced miner, had brought down a fall of rock where it had been least expected. A dozen men had been injured, and some of the shoring had been loosened, imperilling the lives of many more. No reasonably sane consulting engineer, however conscientious, could have imagined it his duty to lead the work of rescue. Measured by the value to the corporation, his one brain was worth a dozen score of miners' lives. Nevertheless, Reed Opdyke had not viewed the matter in that light. He was alert and strong, trained to face every possible emergency known underground. Moreover, he knew better than any other man the conditions likely to be existent in the dismantled vein. Therefore it was Reed Opdyke who had led the first of the rescue parties.

Quite as a matter of course, he had made his way directly to the injured men, had helped to carry them back safely to the main shaft. Providence always looks out for little things like that. It uses its tools before it blunts them. Then Opdyke had gone back again into the vein, to see if he could make up his mind, at a superficial glance, concerning the extent of the damage and the best chances for repairing it. It was then that he found one more miner, wedged between the loosened timbers of the shoring. At best, minutes were ahead of him, not hours. At best, the danger in freeing him was almost infinite. None the less, while other men faltered and drew back, afraid, Opdyke had sent an ax crashing into the weakened timbers.

All this was told to the professor briefly. The rest of the message was couched in terms so surgical as to convey scant meaning to Scott Brenton's brain. At the very end, there were two dates, both only possible, both so remote as to turn Brenton sick at heart. Was it for this that such men as Reed Opdyke were created? Was nature merciless, was law, that it ordained such pitiful, pitiless waste?

It was with these questions ringing in his brain, then, that Scott Brenton, after his old fashion, shut his teeth askew and awaited the still distant homecoming of his old-time idol. He gained the slimmest sort of comfort by remembering how characteristic it all was of the boy he used to know.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

That Reed Opdyke was very badly broken, no one, seeing him, could deny. Exactly what was the nature of the break, no one but Reed Opdyke and the surgeons knew. The surgeons were inclined to secrecy. Reed himself welcomed no queries on the subject. He merely smiled inscrutably, and talked about the weather.

When, in late May, he first came home, his room threatened to become a place for penitential pilgrimage, a _memento-mori_ species of lay shrine; but Reed stopped all that quite firmly. He had no mind to be a hero anywhere, least of all in a town where ninety-seven per cent of the populace was feminine. Moreover, unkindly as he took to hero worship, he took still more unkindly to visits that quite obviously were intended to console him.

"The Lord knows how long I'm destined to be lying up here," he remarked to Olive Keltridge, after one such visitation. "Anyhow, it is sure to be long enough for people to get the habit of me, and a chronic invalid is bound to be used as a spiritual salve. One takes him tracts and grape-fruit jelly, by way of offset to domestic rows. I'm not going to become accessory after the fact to all the local improprieties. It would have a rotten influence upon the entire community."

Olive, who had dropped in ostensibly for purposes of gossip, nodded in comprehension. Indeed, she was in a position to comprehend the situation a long way more perfectly than even Reed, its victim and by no means of doubtful understanding, could ever do. She heard him talked about in a fashion that she found revolting. Her old-time comrade was as much a man as ever, despite his injuries, as sane in all his outlook, as whimsical and impersonal in his fun. She therefore resented the universal attitude of regarding him as a crushed archangel, a candidate for repeated and unlimited doses of mental gruel. If ever a man needed solid social nutriment, it was this energetic young engineer who was temporarily dragged off from the scene of action and reduced to the need of killing time within the limits of four walls. Indeed, it would take a good deal of social nutriment and social spice as well, to bring four walls and the exciting alternations of a canopy-top bed and a chintz couch up to the level of interest gained out of a succession of different mining camps and the different problems they presented, above ground and below. To Reed Opdyke, used to tramping over mountain trails, accustomed to riding anything from a half-broken cayuse to a wabbly platform at a rope's end, the day's journey nowadays limited itself to being lifted out of bed in the arms of his lusty nurse, being placed with all discretion in the exact middle of a couch and in being trundled slowly across the floor to the bay window. Later in the day, the process repeated itself in the reverse direction, but with even greater care because of the fatiguing experiences of the day. Therefore it was that Reed Opdyke preferred his visitors to have the flavour of tabasco, rather than whipped cream.

Olive dropped in upon him, every day, and she always found a welcome. She had known Reed long enough not to be likely to collide with any of his prejudices. She had rollicked with him in his active days often enough to save him from feeling any ignominy in having her behold him in his passive ones. She was never sentimental; never, since their first inevitable bad half-hour together after his return, had she torn her hair, metaphorically speaking, above the spectacle of his afflictions. She merely handed him the things he couldn't reach; and gossiped ceaselessly about the things that were happening among their common friends, without making him half frantic because he could not go out and happen, too. She even, and therein lay her final greatness, blinked at Reed's occasional profanity as concerned his accident, whereas the average woman would have wept maudlinly.

"Your vocabulary is a picturesque one, Reed," she told him, upon one occasion. "I ought to be shocked; but I've known you too long to be shocked at anything you do. Besides, in the end of all things, I imagine I should follow your own deplorable methods of speech. Swearing may not be decent socially; but it's a healthy pastime. Only look out you don't do it in the midst of a pastoral call."

"By the way," Reed looked up suddenly; "I hear that one is imminent."

Olive lifted her brows.

"Who?"

"Brenton."

"Haven't you seen him yet?"

Reed shook his head.

"No. It's been pretty decent of him, too, to hold off a little. Most parsons would have rushed in, hot foot, to administer extreme unction and be sure I was in a proper mood concerning Providence. Brenton has had the decency to wait a little. It was almighty decent, too. I knew him in my palmy days, when life was young. It's young for him still--Hold on, Olive; I'm not going to maunder!--and I had a natural dread of having him come piling in here to crow about himself and cackle over me."

Olive's laugh was obviously forced. Even the most irresponsible of gossips is not always altogether hardened.

"I love your metaphors, Reed," she told him. "To be sure, it never had occurred to me that Saint Peter's cock and Saint Peter's rector were identical terms."

Reed digressed.

"What's Brenton's wife turned into?" he inquired.

Olive cast an apologetic glance at Mrs. Opdyke, knitting by the other window. Then she dropped her hands, palms up, into her lap. The gesture was so expressive as not to need the one word of her answer.

"Impossible."

"I'm not surprised."

"You had seen her?"

"Yes, at our commencement. She was a country daisy, if you choose: but a nig-nose one, not a placid ox-eye."

This time, Olive felt called on to remonstrate.

"Reed, you are becoming intolerable. A man flat on his back ought to be pondering upon the convolutions of his soul, not cultivating flowers of rhetoric."

"Soul be hanged! I keep insisting that mine isn't in any more need of attention than it was when I was up and doing, and it's a long way greater bore. Besides, I am prouder of my rhetoric than of my spiritual convolutions. But about Brenton's wife? She seemed to me then the typical shrewd Yankee who would adapt herself to any sort of circumstances and get the best end of any sort of bargain."

Olive nodded.

"You've about hit it, Reed. But then, I'm not fair to her."

"Not your sort, eh?" But Reed, as he looked at Olive and remembered Catia, felt no real need to put the question.

"It's not that so much--well--no--I can't seem to understand her." Then Olive's eyes met his directly, and she stopped her rambling with a little laugh. "You needn't presume on your position, Reed. It's not decent to make me tell what I think of Mrs. Brenton, when you know you are driving me into a corner where I either have to lie, or else abuse her to a perfectly strange man."

"I'm not a strange man. I've seen her in her salad days. 'Twas potato salad, too, symbolic of the soil whence she had sprung."

But Olive held up her hand for mercy.

"Reed, you are a most impossible type of invalid. If you keep on like this, I'll tell Mrs. Brenton that you'd love to have her come and sing hymns to you."

"Olive! For--" And then his curiosity overcame his consternation. "Can she sing?" he queried.

"Very prettily." Olive's accent defied analysis. "She would love it, too. I know, because, only the other day, she asked me to give you a message."

"And you embezzled it?"

"Until it seemed a proper season. If I had given it too early, you might have mislaid it in your memory, and forgotten to send a grateful answer."

"What did the woman want?" Reed questioned, with a sudden curtness that betrayed to Olive's ear the crackling of the thin ice on which, day by day, they skated over the surface of the tragedy.

Nevertheless, Olive struck out fearlessly. Even if the ice did crack and let them through, such old, well-tried friends as Reed and herself could face what lay beneath it, without sentimental fears. They had taken one such plunge together; they both preferred to avoid another, if they could, and yet better to flounder through the ice than to keep away from it entirely. Therefore Olive's tone was nonchalant, as she reported,--

"I met her in the street, the day after you came home, and she begged me to tell you--"

"She took it as a matter of course you'd be bidden to the private view," Reed interrupted.

"Of course. The whole community understood that. Else, what was the use of our breaking our collar bones in unison, when you lured me into tobogganing off the barn?" Olive replied promptly. "Where was I? Oh, yes,--begged me to tell you how well she remembered your kindness to her--yes, your kindness--when she was a shy child from the country."

Reed's comment was a terse one.

"Shy! She!" he said.

"You sound like an Indian dialect. However--And that she should claim a place among your earlier friends, when the time came when they could sit with you."

Reed squirmed.

"Sit with! Oh, Lord! That settles it, Olive. In spite of all your polite evasions, the town does look upon me as a moral asset, a chronic case to be put upon a par with other charities," he said, with sudden bitterness.

Olive's colour came, though not from annoyance.

"Don't be a dunce, Reed," she besought him. "You merely are the latest sensation in returning prodigals; you haven't sufficient staying power to become a charity, or even a fad. Then I shall tell the sympathetic lady--?"

"To go to everlasting thunder," Reed growled ungratefully. "Hang it all, Olive, does she think I want a row of hens coming to cluck above the ruins?"

"Which reminds me," Olive rose; "when do you look for the conjugal rooster?"

"Brenton? Sit down again; you're not in any hurry," Reed urged her.

But she shook her head.

"No; but I am a hen, and nobody knows when I may forget myself and begin to cluck. No. Truly, Reed, my feelings are injured and I'm going home."

"What's the use? You've nothing in the world to do."

"I beg your pardon, I have domestic cares. My blessed father has to go to Boston at two-twenty. If I don't go home in season to arouse him to the practical details inherent in the fact, he'll be starting off in slippers and without his evening clothes. Really, Reed, I've got to go."

"What are you going to do, this afternoon?" Reed's eyes were wishful, for the time was hanging heavy in his idle hands. "Of course, though, there's no sense in my being selfish."

Olive saw the wishfulness; but she ignored it. Both Professor Opdyke and her father had told her that Reed's sentence was a long one, long and heavy. Both Mrs. Opdyke and her husband had begged the girl to do what she could to keep it from seeming too much like solitary confinement. Olive was fond of Reed, though without the consciousness of a single vein of sentiment to blur their friendship. She enjoyed his society as much as she admired his virile, easy-going manliness. All the more, on this account, she was sure that the only way of keeping their friendship and their enjoyment keen would lie in avoiding any surfeit. For herself, she felt no uneasiness. Reed's society, under no circumstances, could become cloying. But for Reed she did not know. The idler the hands, the sooner they weary of any toy. And poor Reed's hands, in all surety, were very, very idle. Moreover, unless she went out greedily in search of fresh variety, how could she bring it into his present prison? If she spent too much time with him, inevitably they would exhaust their fund of gossip. Then they would be driven into becoming autobiographical, and that would be the finish of their present friendship. Therefore,--

"Sorry, Reed," she told him; "but there's a tea on at the Prathers'. Earlier, I'm taking Dolph Dennison canoeing."

"Olive!" Reed's accent was remonstrant. "How can you stand that little duffer?"

Olive rose to the defence.

"He's not such a duffer. Of course, he's young and callow; but he's good fun."

"Yes; but an instructor, and only rhetoric, at that." Reed's voice showed his scorn.

"You're jealous, Reed. You think he will do better metaphors than you; but you needn't worry. Dolph doesn't talk shop. Besides, he may get to be a real professor, if he keeps at work; and," Olive's glance, merry and not uncomfortably pitiful, rested upon the long-limbed figure lying so flat beside her; "even you must admit it, Reed, that rhetoric is a much safer means of livelihood than engineering. Good bye, boy, and keep out of mischief till I get here, next time."

As it chanced, it was that afternoon that Brenton came to see him, for the first time since Reed's return. Whatever Brenton's thought about the matter, it must be confessed that Opdyke, albeit healthy-minded and as philosophical as a surgical case can ever be, had felt a good deal of dread of their meeting. In the old days, he had been the strong one and the masterful, Brenton the weak. The present reversal of the situation went upon his nerves.

He had remembered Brenton clearly, all these intervening years. More than once, in the intervals of his strenuous life, he had found himself wondering what the gaunt young countryman had become. In the time of it, Reed had had no notion how thoroughly he had liked the fellow, how thoroughly he had believed in his latent possibilities. Looking back upon them now, judging them by the broader standards of his own wider knowledge of the things that really count, Reed had felt his old-time interest grow and quicken. It had caused him no especial surprise, then, when a letter from his father had brought him news of the rector of Saint Peter's. Neither had it caused him any more surprise when his father's later letters recorded bit by bit the intimacy slowly growing up between the scholarly young rector and his father's critical self. Instead, Reed took a certain comfort in reflecting that he had foreseen it all along. However, he had felt an undeniable curiosity to see the shabby, under-nourished Scott Brenton, a thing of shambling feet and knobbly joints, transmogrified into the well-groomed, easy-mannered type of rector which had become traditional at Saint Peter's.

Nevertheless, now that he was at home once more and, to all seeming, candidate for churchly ministrations, Reed found he drew back a little from their meeting. At the start, even though his bodily strength allowed it, his nervous energy shrank from the ordeal of seeing people. It seemed to him that there would be so many things he ought to explain to them to make his position clear. Of course, with his family and the Keltridges and even the despised Dolph Dennison, it was different, although even the irresponsible Dolph had floundered and struck bottom on a conversational reef or two, and it had taken all Reed's grip to haul him off and steer him into deep waters and consequent safety.

Left to himself and thinking the matter over at his leisure, Reed admitted, with an impersonal candour, that it was very easy for his guests to err in tact. A man in his predicament was bound to be a trifle flooring; it did not affect the question in the least that he was in no wise responsible for the predicament. It had resulted, quite simply, from his natural instincts, not from any conscious thirsting for fame and for consequent Carnegie medals. However, the average visitor could not be expected to be aware of that; and therefore he would be more than likely to feel it incumbent upon him to say gracious things in a tremulous falsetto voice. In the present case, the question concerned itself with the problem whether or not Scott Brenton would prove to be the average visitor.

When at last Brenton came, he proved himself to be quite apart from the average. He neither floundered, nor did he err in tact. He even forgot about any proper greetings, so promptly did he fling himself into a tide of reminiscent gossip. Of course, the gossip straightway led to a demand to be brought down to date in Opdyke's history, a demand which concerned itself quite as much with the technique of mining as it did with the more personal aspects of an engineering life and of the final accident. They reached that in course of time, however; and Reed told his tale willingly and without too much reservation, grateful alike for the sympathetic interest and comprehension it evoked in Brenton, and for the half-dozen downright words with which Brenton spoke his sympathy.

"Of course," he added thoughtfully, his eyes on Opdyke's face; "it's bound to be all sorts of a bore for a man like you to be lying up, to say nothing of the waste of time for your profession, and of the purely personal issue of the aches of it. However, I can't be altogether sorry for the chance that strands you here in the edge of my own puddle. I mean to have all the good of you, while you're in range. You remember how the boys used to call me Reed's parson?"

Reed laughed.

"You knew it at the time? I must say you had the trick of looking totally unconscious. Well, it's your turn now. Going, man? Sorry you must; but you'll be coming in again, to-morrow? No; hang it all! You're a parson, and to-morrow is Sunday."

To-morrow was Sunday, and the first one in the month. That meant three services for Brenton, plus a Bible class at noon. Nevertheless, between the services, he contrived to drop in for a look at Opdyke; not that the look, taken as itself, was needful. All that morning long, and a good share of the night before, there had not left him the picture of the long, straight figure on the couch, and of the face above it, the same face he recalled so well, and yet so curiously altered, strengthened. The picture never left him; it was most distinct of all, while, with an unwonted throb in his voice, he slowly read from the open book before him,--

"Thou dost not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men--In Thy wisdom Thou hast seen fit to visit him with trouble--"

Wisdom! Thy wisdom. Brenton's mind lingered on the words, even after his tongue had passed on to the closing phrases of the prayer. Thy wisdom? Yes. But what especial wisdom, what ineffable and divine purpose lay behind the swift blow which had knocked into prostrate helplessness a man such as Reed Opdyke? Was it quite honest and above-board for him himself, Scott Brenton, to kneel there in the chancel, praying aloud and fervently for the sanctification of a Fatherly correction to him whose life, from all accounts, had held no flagrant germ of error? And what especial sanctification was there, beyond shutting one's teeth and taking it quite pluckily and as it came?

Above the open book, Scott Brenton's eyes, wide open and very lustrous, were looking past the bounding walls before him, seeing the brave smile that Reed Opdyke had sent after him by way of parting. Brenton's voice, meanwhile, always flexible and resonant, was throbbing with thoughts which had no possible relation with the words now falling from his tongue,--

"Fulfil the desires--as may be most expedient for them."

He recalled his mind to the words he uttered, recalled it with a jerk. Was it expedient for Reed Opdyke to be overthrown and laid aside more or less indefinitely, just as he was about touching the fulness of professional success? Who ordained what was expedient, anyway? Providence?

And then, in the hush that followed after the benediction, there came into Brenton's ears the echo of Reed's voice, gay and indomitable rather by force of will than from conviction.

"No," he had said to Brenton, midway in their conversation of the day before. "No; it's not a chastisement of Providence. I have too much respect for Providence to lay off on it the result of some infernal fool's careless use of explosives. Providence, as a rule, doesn't go out gunning with black powder. Its ways are more ineffable than that."

And yet, if not Providence, or its equivalent, Scott Brenton asked himself above his clasped hands, then what?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was a month or two before he asked that question of Doctor Eustace Keltridge; but, in the end, it was bound to come. Whatever a man in Brenton's position might think inside himself, professionally he must talk of Providence, and of divine dispensations, and of all the rest of his ecclesiastical stock in trade. Far harder than the talking, though, was the assenting to others when they talked, for then he had no choice of modifying phrases; he must take it as it came. Of course, it never would have done for the rector of St. Peter's Parish to deny the Fatherly finger of correction as the motive power of Reed Opdyke's chastisement. None the less, the increasing number of hours he contrived to spend in Opdyke's room gave a decreasing heartiness to his assent. Even if he was a preacher, Scott Brenton was a judge of men. No man who was not a dunce could have studied Opdyke, through all those weeks, and come out from the study to deny the inherent cleanliness and uprightness of his life. Then, wherefore the chastisement? Study the case as he would through the lens of his ecclesiasticism, Scott Brenton could not discover any especial need of sanctification for the virile, clever engineer.

"And yet," he burst out to Doctor Keltridge over a cigar, one day; "we are bound by all our articles of indenture, we preachers, to prate about the hand of the Lord and special Providences, when all the time we know the trouble came out of somebody's running up against simple, scientific law. It's theology, not science, we poor beggars are set up to preach, even in funeral sermons of men like Opdyke, although it's not theology, but just plain science, or the lack of it, that's killed them."

"Well?" the doctor queried.

"Well." Brenton uncrossed his legs and, with a sudden snap, crossed them the other way. "What I want to know is this: what in the world is going to become of us fellows who go on preaching one thing, while we believe another?"

"According to the Book of Revelation, you'll become a sulphate," the doctor told him grimly.

Brenton tossed aside his cigar, thrust his fists into his pockets and rose to pace the floor.

"Don't joke, doctor," he said impatiently. "For once, I'm past it, past its doing me any good, I mean. A baby, frightened at the dark and howling for its nurse, isn't going to be diverted with a phosphorescent jumping jack. Now you see here. It isn't only the case of Opdyke, though God knows that is a flagrant instance of exactly what I mean. All week long, I am coming into contact with just such cases, cases where the physical cause and effect and the moral one can't possibly be stretched until they coincide. Somebody breaks one of the eternal laws, the laws laid down in Genesis and provable in any twentieth-century laboratory. He gets off scot free, and neither realizes what he's done, nor pays the penalty. The flying pieces, though, fall on some other man who is trudging along the trail of another law and keeping it at every point. He gets killed, or worse; and the first man never knows what he has accomplished. That sort of thing is happening all the time, somewhere or other. As a rule, too, the victim is a long way a better man than the original sinner who brought the ruin on him. Week days, we go to see him and, so far as our priestly vocabularies will allow, we help him to swear at the fate that has bowled him over. Nevertheless, on Sunday morning, we haul out our sanctity and our surplices, put them both on, and hold forth about Fatherly correction and a lot of other things that, in our heart of hearts, we don't believe."

"Don't you?" the doctor asked him suddenly, after a short pause.

"I do not."

"Don't you, as a priest, believe, for instance, that this whole trouble was sent to Opdyke for his betterment?"

Brenton halted in his walk, and gazed down at the doctor fearlessly.

"I do not," he said.

"You profess to," the doctor reminded him, with scant mercy.

Brenton's lips stiffened.

"Exactly. There is the trouble. I also profess, two or three times each Sunday, that I believe in the resurrection of the body. Nevertheless, any such belief is impossible for a man who has ever seen the equipment of a modern laboratory. As for Opdyke's case, why is it any more for his betterment than it's for the betterment of the little baby whose nurse accidentally gives it strychnine instead of squills?"

"Don't be archaic, Brenton," the doctor bade him. "One doesn't give squills nowadays. However--"

Brenton flung up his head impatiently. The doctor liked the gesture, liked the little angry glint in the gray eyes.

"You mean then," he persisted slowly, and Brenton, listening, was aware that he was talking as one man to another, not as the senior warden of Saint Peter's to its rector; "that you are saying things on Sunday that you're denying, all the week?"

Brenton nodded curtly.

"That's about the size of it."

Well as he had come to know the doctor, the next query took him by surprise.

"What have you been eating?" Doctor Keltridge demanded briefly.

"Eating!" Scott Brenton's voice was as blank as were his eyes.

"Yes, eating," the doctor iterated. "Doubts are generally more or less digestive in their origin. Caviar would have made a total agnostic of Saint John himself, and Saint Luke would have been the first one to tell him so, and order a blue pill." As he spoke, he gazed at Brenton critically. "You're running down, man, for a fact. Is this thing worrying you?" he asked kindly.

"Well, yes, a little," Brenton confessed. "It's bound to, doctor. I'm not agnostic in the least; I believe that any creed has got to be interpreted with more than a grain of salt, according to one's especial nature and its secretions. However, it's beginning to go against my ideas to discover that there's more salt than belief within me when I get up to recite my Credo."

The doctor laughed, in comfortable comprehension.

"It depends a little on how your salt analyzes out, Brenton. It may be much more harmless than you think, just a normal precipitate and not a deadly poison. However," and the doctor's face twinkled with humorous sympathy; "it's just about as well to keep it in solution for the present. Therefore, both as your medical adviser and as your senior warden, I'm going to give you a tonic to that end. Moreover, I want you to eat lots of underdone beef, to drink lots of good beer, and spend a good half your time out-doors. Then, if the doubts hang on, come back to me and I'll take another whack at them. They're harmless enough now, like most germs in their early stages of development; but nobody knows what they may turn into, if we let them go on working. Now come along into the laboratory and watch my latest bacillus increase and multiply. It beats the sons of Adam into a cocked hat; and it has more horns than all of your damned doubtings put together." On the threshold of the laboratory, however, the old doctor paused. His accent, when he spoke, was absolutely reverent, despite his words. "Brenton, you all of you admit, whether you believe in eternal law or in special creation, that God made man in His own image. Then, granted a proper ancestry for every germ, there must have been some place for doubtings, even in the original and immortal Pattern. If that's the case, why should we all of us set ourselves up to confound them utterly? They must have some worthy purpose; else they never would have survived."

Side by side, the two men hung over the bacillus and forgot the doubtings. Later, when Brenton went away, he took with him the prescription for the tonic and gave the doctor his solemn word of honour that he would straightway telephone for beef and beer. He kept his word so well, and so clever had been the doctor's diagnosis that Reed Opdyke, flat on his back through all the torrid heat of summer, felt moved to express his envious approbation.

"Hang it all, Brenton, what are you doing to yourself, these latter days?" he demanded, one morning after the four walls of his prison room had seemed closing in upon him and smothering him, during all the sultry night. "You look as fit as a fighting cock, when all the rest of us are grilly worms. How do you manage it? Whatever the state of your spiritual graces, at least you're growing in purely fleshly ones."

Brenton laughed at the accent of the compliment which unmistakably was begrudged. Nevertheless, the laugh stopped short at his lips, and his gray eyes were sober as they looked down upon his friend. The "puffic' fibbous" was distinctly worse for wear, that morning. His eyes were heavy, and his wavy hair clung limply about the temples where the hollows were showing more and more clearly with every passing day. He was growing whiter, too, with the uncanny waxiness of a surface lighted from within. The absolute confinement and the pitiless heats of summer were telling on the "puffic' fibbous ", reducing him to the merest shell of his old-time self, and yet the shell was by no means hollow. Within it still lurked the old magnetic Reed, plucky, indomitable.

"You're positively waxing fat, you healthy beggar," he went on, before Brenton could speak; "and Keltridge had the nerve to tell me he had been giving you a tonic. What went wrong? Digestion, the scourge of parsons? Or were you pining for your customary adulation, denied you now those college girls have gone off for the summer?" The lazy voice was full of contentment in its own mockery. To hear Reed speaking, one would have been sure that the world was all before him, waiting at his idle feet.

Brenton's answer echoed the selfsame note.

"Adulation, Opdyke! I'm a hard-worked clergyman, and target for more criticism than you engineers have ever dreamed of."

"Much you are! But do sit down. You make me want to get up, too, when you rage around like that. No; not that stuffed chair. It's too hot. Try that cane thing, and, while you're about it, there's a siphon in that ice chest over there. So far as I've discovered, that's the one decent thing about being knocked out in summer; they're in honour bound to have an iced supply-place handy. But, about the adulation, I know whereof I speak. The average college girl hasn't a softly wooing voice, and I haven't spent my time lurking here invisible for nothing. The little dears have favoured me with their views of most things and all men, myself included. It has been done quite unconsciously; I know that because of the flavour of some of their remarks as concerned myself." And, contrary to his custom, Reed laughed bitterly. "As for you, Brenton, I wonder you're not as bad as Baalam's ass. If they could have their way, they would strip you of your clerical broadcloth and robe you in a full suit of angelic eider down. Still, you needn't look smug, while you deny it; it's nothing to be proud about. It's not your preaching does it, man; it's chiefly on account of your voice, and the way your hair sprouts from your scalp. For pure purposes of religion, a hairy baritone is a long way more potent than a bald and quavering tenor; at least, so far as the youthful student is concerned. But what's the tonic?"

Obediently Brenton had dropped down into the chair, the cane thing. First, though, he had deposited his hat and stick upon the nearest table and hunted out the siphon, as Opdyke had suggested. Then,--

"The doctor says it's for my spiritual doubtings," he answered. "Myself, I more than half suspect it's for my sense of humour."

"Hm!" Opdyke commented crisply. "They're only husband and wife--after the divorce. What's the row?"

The answer came only in a little sigh, curiously like a groan.

Reed half closed his eyes, and peered up at Brenton through the crack.

"Mental growing pains?" he queried. "Too bad, old man. I thought you had passed that epoch; it generally comes with the cutting of one's wisdom teeth. Anyhow, we all go through it sooner or later."

"Sometimes both," Brenton answered restlessly.

Reed's eyes opened, with a snap.

"You've been through it once before? Of course. I remember now; you started as an ultra-Calvinist, and came over with a flop. Whittenden of Saint Luke's told me. He always claimed he was the man who did the deed."

"You knew Whittenden?" For the moment, Brenton forgot all other matters in the question.

"Rather! And it's not the sort of privilege one is likely to forget. He is 'the whole state of Christ's Church Militant' in his own stubby, curly-headed little person." Reed's voice grew resonant with every syllable.

"I know." Brenton nodded. "Where did you run across him?"

"In Colorado. A cousin of his had lungs, and Whittenden put in his whole vacation, two years ago, helping the man keep from being too badly bored. We had an accident; a cage fell and smashed a dozen miners. Every single man of them was at the end of things, and they were Catholics. Most of them couldn't speak ten words of English. The nearest priest was across the divide, ten miles away, and the poor beggars hadn't ten minutes to wait. They knew that, according to their religion, it meant eternal hell for them. Whittenden heard about it, and came running, book in one hand, surplice in the other. The way he made that service for the dying hum was a caution; but he got it done in time, before the first man died." Reed's face was growing scarlet with the excitement of the memory. "It was Protestant, of course; but they didn't know English enough to find it out, and they died happy in the certainty that he'd saved them. Then he yanked off his surplice as fast as he'd yanked it on, and went to work to help us lay them out decently, before their wives and children saw them. I tell you what, Brenton--" Lost to the present in the old, exciting memory, Reed forgot himself and started up. "Oh, damn!" he said, and fainted quietly away, cut out of consciousness of agony unspeakable.

An hour afterward, Brenton left Reed comparatively comfortable, and went his way. Like most men in such an emergency, he had been thoroughly terrified. The reaction from his terror left him thoughtful, even a little morbid. The fact of his manifest uselessness in the eyes of Reed's trained nurse led him to doubt his usefulness in the more legitimate fields of his own profession. For the rest, his friends were all of a piece. Opdyke and Whittenden alike had risen to the emergency with which fate had confronted them, had done their downright, obvious duty, regardless of any consequences beyond the simple one of fulfilling the immediate need. They were men of action and sincerity, men who really counted to the world. He--

He smiled bitterly. Reed Opdyke's chaff, meant in all good nature, had struck home to the very marrow of his self-distrust. He had clambered to a pedestal where he stood and preached banal things which, in reality, he doubted, and smiled at his congregation, and sniffed contentedly at the fumes of incense rising about him, incense of which he was but too well aware. He would have had no idea how to stop it; but, if the truth were told, he had had no especial wish to stop it, if he could. It had been a pleasant experience, this knowing himself the idol of a steadily increasing share of his congregation. He had known it, as a matter of course; he had done his best to convince himself that it came from the quality of the gospel which he preached, from the sincerity and fire with which he preached it.

Now, all at once, denying nothing of the popularity, the adulation, as Opdyke had called it, he forced himself to deny his former theory of its cause. It was as Reed had said. Indeed, it had been a constant marvel to Brenton, all those summer months, how much more clearly Reed, flat on his back inside four walls, did see things than the rest of them. Reed had told a truth as undeniable as it was unpalatable: that all of Brenton's adulation came, not from his priestly fervour, but from such personal details as eyes and hair and vibrant vocal cords. As for sincerity--Had he ever been sincere, in any of his preaching? Had any word of his, measured by the simple tenets of his creed, ever in reality rung true? Could he ever, knowing of a surety what he did, ever attain sincerity, so long as he remained the priest? He doubted.

This time, his doubts took hold of him. Indeed, it is a far more unsettling process to doubt one's self than it is to doubt the ultimate truths of a wholly impersonal system of salvation. For the next few weeks, Brenton shunned his fellow men almost completely, while he took his doubtings far afield and wrestled with them there. Moreover, despite the doctor's tonic and the ozone of the autumn-tinctured air, Brenton came in from tramping over the mountains, or up and down the valley, weary in mind, distressed in soul. He yearned acutely, in these weeks, for contact with his kind: for Professor Opdyke and the sturdy doctor, for Reed, for Olive whose clear eyes always saw the soul beneath the aura. Nevertheless, he kept away from them all absolutely. This was a matter he must settle with himself alone, a battle to be fought out in silence and with himself as sole antagonist. A ring of commenting spectators, applauding while they looked on, could only blunt the point of his attacks which, to be final, must be swift and sure.

It was a curious commentary upon Scott Brenton's domestic life that, shrinking as he did from contact with his kind, he yet felt no wish to withdraw himself from Kathryn. The statement of the fact contains its explanation. Kathryn was his wedded wife; he loved her. Nevertheless, she was not of his kind, nor ever had been. Such crises as his present one would have been incomprehensible to her. Therefore, Scott faced it, with Kathryn at his side.

Now and then, though, over their morning coffee, Scott had a wayward longing to open the day's arena to her, to force her to look in upon the fight he waged. Then he gave up the idea disdainfully. As well try to leave his hand-print on an iron bar or a gray granite slab as to seek to impress on Kathryn's mind the vital nature of the questions that were haunting him, taunting him, turning his life into a purgatory of uncertainties whether his choice of profession had been aught but a selfish wish for an easy and spectacular road to social eminence.

Just once, he thought he had impressed her.

Throughout this time, Brenton's sermons were prepared with a fury of devotion to which, of old, they had been strangers. As the autumn waxed and waned to winter, and the holy Advent season came to hand, he cast his doubts aside and sought to bury them beneath the glorious gospel of the Advent song: Peace to Men of Good Will. Indeed, there came one Sunday morning when the message of good will downed all the other voices, doubts, hopes, or fears, downed them beneath its brave promises of inheritance for him who lives according to its simple law.

Brenton, afire with his message, self-forgetful, thrilling with the greatness of his theme, felt his congregation taking fire beneath him. For the hour, at least, there could be no question of his sincerity, of his belief in the gospel he was preaching, a simple gospel of generosity and love and of hard, ungrudging work for universal betterment. Into his last sentences, careless of self, he flung the outpourings of his very soul, and the quick sentences fell, one, and one, and one, into the hush made out of many minds sharing a common mood. Brenton felt it, and gave thanks. Here and now was his vindication, here at last the proof that he had not chosen his calling meanly, nor in all selfishness.

One after another, then, his congregation yielded to his sway. Last of them all to yield was Kathryn, sitting in a front pew and, after her custom, smiling up at him in an admiration which he had come to find galling in its emptiness of any meaning. But, at the last passionately fervent words, her blank smile faded and, for the first time in all his preaching, her face became overcast, intent. His sermon ended, Brenton bowed his head in a benediction which, in his heart, he sent most earnestly upon his wife. Perchance the selfsame hour that saw his self-vindication should also see the rending of the veil of non-comprehension which had fallen down between the two of them.

The luncheon hour, however, brought with it disillusion. Over the luncheon, Kathryn spoke.

"Scott," she asked her husband; "did you see me frowning at you, this morning, just as you were finishing?"

He looked up from his plate, the light of happiness already dimming a little in his eyes.

"I saw--" He hesitated. Then he said quite simply, "Yes."

"Did you know why?" Kathryn took another olive, as she spoke.

In total silence, he shook his head.

There was a little pause, while