Introduction (part 2)

Stolidly regardless of the criticism, Olive returned to her former theme. She did this of a distinct purpose, too. It seemed to her to be quite incredible that the woman before her could be blind to her husband's haggard face. None the less, watching Kathryn, she could not in sincerity accuse her of any shamming.

"It really has worried us, my father and me, that Mr. Brenton hasn't looked quite as strong lately, as when he came here," she insisted.

"Oh, I think he is quite well. Men," Kathryn gave a vindictive sort of flap to the front breadths of her dressing gown; "never know what it is to be really ill. I tell Scott, if he were in my place—"

In mercy to probabilities, Olive interrupted.

"Saint Peter's has grown so fast, since he came here," she said.

Kathryn promptly took umbrage at the singular number of the pronoun.

"I'm sure we've done our best," she answered tartly. "It has been hard work, though, in such a dead old town as this."

"But, with all the college girls—" Olive was beginning.

Kathryn cut her short.

"They count for nothing in the parish. They just come to church, when they get up in season; that's about all. Of course, it would be a good thing if they did count for more. The poor old church is in need of something young and lively; now and then it seems to me to be fairly doddering. Poor Scott feels it, too. He can't help it. Every man and woman in the congregation was born, ready made, with a whole set of prejudices, born in a rut that nothing can break down. I tell him—"

Once more Olive interrupted. Indeed, it was her only method of driving in an entering wedge of speech.

"That is what we old New Englanders love, Mrs. Brenton," she said, with a sweetness that was almost acid. "Remember that we and our ancestors have lived in these same houses since King George the Third's day, and then you will forgive us for some of our ready-made prejudices."

Kathryn glanced up suspiciously. Then she sought to flay her guest with all discretion.

"Really? How very tiresome you must have found it!" she made answer.

"Not at all. It's the other thing that we find so tiresome," Olive assured her, not without some malice.

"Where did you see Mr. Brenton?" Kathryn asked her quite abruptly.

"He was going to call on Mr. Opdyke."

"Reed, or the professor?"

This time, Olive's accent was not to be mistaken.

"Mr. Reed Opdyke," she said.

Kathryn ignored the rebuke completely.

"How is Reed?" she queried.

Then Olive gave it up, and left her to her chosen methods.

"About the same."

"Isn't there anything I can do for him yet?" Kathryn inquired, with an abrupt letting down of her terse dignity. "It does seem a shame I can't do something to help the poor fellow along, especially when it is so many years that I have known him. It's not as if he were a mere acquaintance, of course, and I want him to feel quite at liberty to send for me, whenever he wants me."

"I am sure he does, Mrs. Brenton," Olive assured her, with gentle malice, for not in vain was "the poor fellow" phrase rankling in her mind.

"Then why in the world doesn't he send?" Kathryn asked rather injudiciously.

Olive dodged the only direct answer she could have made.

"Perhaps he shrinks a little—" she was starting.

Kathryn, still regardless of the waggling little tail, shook her head in vehement negation.

"Oh, he wouldn't be shy with me, Miss Keltridge. Remember, I'm quite an old married woman now; there's no reason he should feel at all—Besides, he sees you," she added, her voice sharpening with the sudden recollection.

Olive laughed.

"Me? Oh, I'm totally amorphous, Mrs. Brenton, a mere lump of old associations. It's good for Mr. Opdyke to have somebody to giggle with occasionally."

Kathryn's voice betrayed her dislike of the flippant answer.

"Poor dear man! I guess he doesn't giggle very often. Really, Miss Keltridge, I sometimes wonder if you realize how very sad it is."

"Very likely not," Olive said dryly.

"No; that's what I say. You see him so often that you get used to it. It is so easy to take such things as a matter of course."

"You think so?" The dryness was increasing. "It never had occurred to me to feel like that."

"No?" Then all at once Kathryn dropped her antagonisms and smiled across at Olive. "Dear Miss Keltridge, I don't want to gossip; but, between old friends like ourselves, one can speak out. Has it ever seemed strange to you that we none of us know just what is wrong with Reed Opdyke? Or do you know?"

"I have no idea at all."

"But don't you ever wonder?"

"No; it's not my business," Olive said curtly. Then her sense of downright honour undermined her curtness. "Yes; after all, I suppose that, being human, I do wonder now and then."

"Then you don't know, either?"

"How should I?"

"You see him so very often."

Olive stiffened.

"Really, Mrs. Brenton, it's not a thing one talks about."

"Oh?" Kathryn's accent was indescribable. "I supposed he'd talk to you. Or haven't you ever asked him?"

"I have not."

Kathryn leaned a little nearer.

"After all, Miss Keltridge, doesn't that seem a little bit—"

Olive waited.

"Self—er—centred?"

"I don't see how. Mr. Opdyke would tell me, if he cared to have me know."

"Unless he thought you would find it out by intuition," Kathryn suggested balmily, as she leaned back in her chair and smoothed her dressing gown.

It was with difficulty that Olive downed her amusement.

"Intuition, as a rule, doesn't count for much with spines and internal injuries," she said.

Kathryn once more became eager.

"Then it is his spine, poor dear man?"

And once more Olive became dry.

"I should think it highly probable from the way they are treating him."

"Terrible; isn't it?" And Olive almost forgave her hostess all things, for the sake of the one word of honest and spontaneous pity, devoid of all "poor dears." Then her forgiveness waned. "However, if I were in your place, I'd ask him outright what is the trouble. I think the Opdykes owe it to their friends to speak out and end the mystery, and put a stop to all the gossip."

"Is there gossip?" Olive queried disdainfully, as she arose.

Still seated, Kathryn stared up at her with eyes that were determined to lose no flicker of an answering confession.

"Of course. In a case like this, there's bound to be. There's every sort of story floating about. Some people even go so far as to say that they only brought home the top end of him; that all that shows below his waist is only a padded roll of blankets. That's one reason I want so much to see him; I know I could tell whether there was any truth in such absurd stories." She pulled herself up short; then went on with a change of tone. "Of course, though, what I really want is to help him pass the time, if I can. He must be very lonely for thoroughly congenial people. Must you go? Be sure you give the poor dear man my message. And good bye. Next time, I do hope I shall have a respectable maid to let you out. I'm quite ashamed—Good bye."

Out on the steps in the clean February air and sunshine, Olive drew in a deep, full breath.

"Poor, dear old Reed!" she said. And then, in quite another tone, "Poor Mr. Brenton! How totally impossible she is!"

And, meanwhile, the "puffic' fibbous," quite unaware of their discussion of his personality and its injuries, lay smiling mirthfully up into the eyes of his old friend.

"Spit it out, Brenton! Rift it aff yer chist!" he adjured him. "Something has gone bad inside your Denmark, and I'm so far kindred to the blessed angels that I don't tell any tales."

Brenton squirmed with a physical uneasiness that was an outward and visible sign of his spiritual one.

"What's the use?"

"Ease your mind. It's a good thing to get rid of waste matter, if 't is waste. Else, if it's any good, it will gain value by being set forth in order. Go ahead with your firstly. By the way, why don't you smoke?"

"Because I have a conscience," Brenton told him bluntly.

"Approaching Lent; or on my account? Don't mind me. I rather long for the smell of the stuff, even if the taste of it is forbidden me. Really, Brenton," and Opdyke looked up at him with singularly unclouded eyes; "that's about my present life in epitome. I offer you the idea for your next sermon."

"Sermon be hanged! I don't serve up my friends, by way of garnishing my theoretical beliefs," Brenton objected shortly.

Opdyke made a wry face.

"That's where you miss your innings, then. I understand, by way of Ramsdell, that the Methodist incumbent lately preached a sermon upon resignation, and did me the honour of taking me, quite specifically, to illustrate his climax. That is what I call fame, Brenton, a greater fame than any I ever could have garnered in by way of engineering."

"Beastly thing to do!" Brenton made brief comment.

"Wasn't it? When I get on my legs again, if ever I do, I'll call him out and lick him. By the way, the last of my cigars are in that drawer. Don't let them spoil. Well, as I was saying, what humbugs you parsons are!"

Brenton, digging in the chaos of the drawer before him, lifted up his head.

"Aren't we, though!" he said, with sudden energy.

"Hullo!" Reed stared at him in astonishment. "You've found it out?"

"I have."

"How long since?"

Brenton hesitated.

"Six or eight months."

Reed laughed unconcernedly.

"Coincident with my home-coming, Scott? I hope I didn't bring the seeds of disaffection with me. But, for a fact, is that the present row?"

"Yes."

There came a long silence. Then Reed spoke.

"Brenton, you always were a curiously constructed creature mentally. What is the matter? Is your present ecclesiastical harness galling you?"

"Yes." Brenton lighted a match with exceeding awkwardness.

"Bedding is inflammable, Brenton," Reed warned him. "Therefore I advise you to keep a steady hand. I'm too big a brand for a slim chap like you to pluck from the burning, to our mutual comfort. Apropos, there's another grand idea for your sermon. You can suppress the naughty nicotine motif for the theme, if you choose. But what in thunder, made you put on the harness, in the first place?"

"Filial devotion."

"Exactly. I remember. But you chose another pattern, sloughed off the work-horse collar of Calvinism in favour of the lighter ritualistic bridle, if I may speak picturesquely. You made your choice. Now what's the matter? Hitched up too short; or have you kicked over the traces?"

"No; not yet." Brenton spoke grimly, his overcast gray eyes offering a curious contrast to the sunny brown ones of the man lying flat and still before him.

This time, Reed looked anxious.

"I wouldn't, Scott," he said, and a little note of affection came into his tone. "You'll sure be sorry."

"But, if I can't help it?"

"You can." Reed spoke crisply.

"I can't. The whole thing is galling me, I tell you, the whole—" Brenton hesitated; "infernal sham." The last two words he flung out with a heavy defiance.

"Sham isn't a polite word for that sort of thing," Opdyke answered swiftly. "You're the parson, Brenton; I am nothing but a sinner cut down in my prime. Still, in your place, I think I wouldn't call it all a sham. There's too much good inside it. When one has all the time there is, one thinks it out, good and bad, to the bitter end. And there's any amount more good than bad in the whole combination."

Brenton nodded; but the nod implied more denial than assent.

"Perhaps," he said slowly. "Still, it's any amount less provable."

"Proof be hanged! You'll never succeed in reducing the moral universe to a set of molecular equations, Brenton. Best give it up, and take what's left in the most thankful spirit that you can, not let the unprovable part of it get on your nerves like this."

Brenton chewed the end of his cigar, as if it had been the cud of his spiritual discontent.

"But, by my profession, I am here to preach the truth," he burst out at length.

"Preach it, then," Opdyke advised him calmly.

"According to my notion, truth can always be proved."

"Prove it, then," Opdyke advised him, with unabated calm.

"It won't." Brenton spoke with the curt elision of his country ancestry.

Opdyke watched him steadily for more than a minute. Then,—

"Brenton, don't make an ass of yourself," he besought his friend. "You have befuddled your brain with such big words as truth and proof; but don't go on your nerves about it. You are doing any amount of good, from all accounts, here in the town. If you keep steady and sane, you'll come to where you have an influence with a big, big I, and end by really counting for something in the place you've chosen. If your harness galls you, then pad it up. You can make it fit, if you spend a little time on it. But, if you go restive and kick over the traces and bolt, you'll do a lot of harm, not only to yourself, but to the people who'll go plunging after you, without having brains enough to know just why they do it. Yes, I know I am preaching; but what of it? I got the habit, years ago," his smile was strangely gentle, strangely full of such love as is rarely given by one man to another; "when old Mansfield put you in my care. No; I know you weren't aware of it, but he did. Anyhow, it has given me a sense of responsibility over you, and I hate the notion of lying here on my back, and seeing you preparing to make a mess of your whole life, at just this stage of the game."

"Thanks, Opdyke." Brenton shut his hand on the long, nervous fingers, shut it and left it there. "But would it be a mess?"

"For the present, yes. Later, it's another question. You've put yourself under fire, and you've gone panicky; I know the feeling. I had it, first time I saw a premature blast go off and hurt a man, and I nearly chucked the whole profession and went into a banking office. Later, I steadied, found out that even an occasional killing," he winced at his own words, even as he spoke them; "doesn't count for much, beside the good done by the total output of a mine. Therefore I kept on, studied the mine and shut my eyes to the victims. In the end, I steadied, and so will you. However, Scott," and the long, nervous fingers shut hard about the hand above them; "I am quite well aware that the intermediate stage of funking the side issue is bound to give us an occasional bad half-hour. Still, as you love your profession, hang on to it by the last little corner, until you steady down."

"Yes." Brenton spoke slowly, while there flashed before him in swift alignment all the details for which his profession stood: place and popularity and influence, the best of human and social ties, the fulfilled ambitions, the closest sort of contacts with his kind. All these he saw, as rounded out to their fullest measure. Beside them was himself, outwardly active, spiritually as stark and still as was the broken body of his friend before him. In that instant, it was given to Brenton to measure himself beside his possibilities, and the measure was not wholly reassuring. "Yes," he repeated slowly; "but what is going to be the final good gained by my hanging on, in case I never steady down?"

Reed compressed his lips. Then, out of his own experience, he spoke.

"In that case, at least you'll have had the satisfaction of finding out that, science and theology to the contrary notwithstanding, in the final end it's solely up to you."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

"But, really, she wasn't always so impossible," Olive argued above the coffee, that night.

"All things are possible to an open mind," her father rejoined placidly.

Olive changed her phrase for one more downright.

"Then, if you must have it, she wasn't always so totally vulgar as she is now."

"Time always brings development," Doctor Keltridge reminded her benignly, while he thrashed about in his cup with a spoon, much as he might have wielded a glass rod in a delinquent mixture. Then, his spoon poised in mid air, he asked, with a sudden show of curiosity, "On what do you base your theory, Olive?"

Olive's reply was feminine, and very convincing to herself.

"Because, if she had been, she never would have been asked out to dinner."

"Duty," Doctor Keltridge suggested.

"Well, not twice at the same place, then."

"She doesn't eat with her knife," the doctor responded hopefully. "Therefore she must be evolving just a very little."

"How do you know?"

"Because she used to—evidently. That type always does."

Olive laughed.

"Father, I don't believe you ever have really admired Mrs. Brenton," she said.

"No." The doctor spoke with slow decision. "There is no especial reason that I should. She is a totally brainless little cus—"

"Father!"

The doctor shot one expressive glance at his horrified daughter. Then, with exceeding deliberation, he continued his interrupted word.

"—tomer, and her only place in the moral universe is to act as a leech on Brenton's nervous system. The worst of it is, when her beneficent work is ended, he'll find out that he is powerless to shake her off. It's enough, the watching them, I mean, to make one believe in a tentative marriage system, at least within the rural districts. The bumpkin comes up to marriageable age, and takes the first—"

"Father!" Olive remonstrated once more. "Mr. Brenton isn't a bumpkin. He never was."

"My dear," the doctor set down his empty cup; "who mentioned Brenton, anyway? I was merely talking about Brenton's wife."

Olive went a step backward in the conversation.

"She may not literally eat with her knife," she said; "but, at least, she does it metaphorically, and then, at the end, she licks it. Yes, that's very vulgar; but it is true, and there's nobody but you to hear it. Listen. I haven't told you the worst yet." And Olive recounted to her father Kathryn Brenton's catechism concerning Opdyke, her manifest and merciless curiosity, so thinly veiled behind her avowed desire to administer consolation.

When she had finished, the doctor shook his wise gray head.

"Some women are merely pussy cats, Olive, and some of them are panthers," he said gravely. "I am glad you told me. I'll put the Opdykes on their guard. Reed has seemed to be gaining lately; more depends on his nerves than those New York butchers of his are quite aware. I do know it, because I've taken care of his mother ahead of him; and there are some cases when an old-fashioned doctor with common sense and a closet full of family traditions is worth a dozen modern surgeons. Reed has been doing a little better lately; you and Dolph Dennison, with all your nonsense, are steadying him wonderfully. But that she-gargoyle! Olive, she'd have Reed in his coffin, inside of half an hour. I'll see that she's kept out on the steps. If she wants to kill her husband, I can't help it. She's got her grip on him. I'll be hanged, though, if she gets that nose of hers inside Reed Opdyke's room."

"I wonder," Olive rested her elbows on the table, and spoke down at her interlaced fingers; "wonder why it is we both of us dislike her so."

"I've been her doctor," Doctor Keltridge observed, as if that one fact were sufficient explanation.

"But she must have lucid intervals."

"Precious few," the doctor growled. "What's worse, they are getting fewer, every week. If I were in Brenton's place, I'd take to drink, and use that as an excuse for beating her. He's denied that luxury, though, by what she calls his cloth. To hear her talk, you'd think we laymen dressed in tissue-paper napkins."

Olive disregarded the digression.

"And yet, she isn't really bad to him."

"Depends on what you call being really bad," the doctor growled again. "Of course, she doesn't put senna in his tea, nor take tucks in his Sunday trousers; but she does nip off the tips of all his best growths with that temper of hers, or else freeze them with her lack of comprehension. She's a pachyderm and she's a pig; and, if she keeps on, she'll drag her husband to her level. Brenton's got yeast in him, Olive, fine, lively yeast. There is no telling what he would rise to, if only we could succeed in abolishing her."

"If only she wouldn't allude to him in public as His Reverence!" Olive sighed. "It is almost as bad as her coy flirtation with him, during sermon time. If I were in his place, I'd brain her."

The doctor pushed his chair back from the table.

"You couldn't," he said concisely. "It's not according to the laws of nature."

He started for his laboratory. A moment later, he came back again, his coat under his arm, his hair rampant and his tie already gloriously askew.

"She can 'Reverence' him all she wants to," he said, casting the words at Olive as if they had been an iron projectile; "but she doesn't care one grain for him. In fact, she only cares for the materials shut up inside her skin. She's a monstrosity of selfishness; that's what she is, no more fit to be a rector's wife, wife of a man like Brenton, than a tin can of corned beef with a crack in it. She's poisonous, Olive, poisonous! Ptomaines aren't in it, by comparison. At least, they're sudden; and she drags it out to all infinity. Poor Brenton!" And, with a gulp of sympathetic ire, the doctor vanished, this time to be seen no more.

Whatever were the doctor's forms of speech, his facts were sound. Not in vain had he been Scott Brenton's senior warden, all these months; not in vain Kathryn's medical adviser and unwilling confidant, during the recent weeks of her approach to motherhood. He had learned to know the fineness of the man, the reverent housing he gave to his ideals, the care he lavished on their betterment; and just so surely he also knew the sordid selfishness of the woman, her lack of any ideals beyond the petty ones concerning food and raiment and mere personal advancement, her ruthless disregard of all that related to her husband's individual or professional welfare. Scott Brenton spoke even of his doubts with a reverent reticence. Kathryn Brenton vaunted her supposed beliefs in phrases which, even to the bluff old doctor's ears, amounted to the extreme of blasphemy. The rector, even in the richness of his humour, treated as somehow fine and sacred matters of every-day routine. The rector's lady took the very materials that went into her husband's Sunday sermons, and used them as themes for joking of a species which passed the limits of the doctor's comprehension. To Scott, the very religion that he sought to question, was a pure white lily reverently to be placed beneath his microscope. To Kathryn, it was a red, red rose to be worn flauntingly upon the apex of her Sunday hat. On week days, she was developing a cheap irreverence which never could be in danger of turning into anything more vital. It needs some brains and no small amount of reverence in any man, before he can become an honest agnostic; in both brains and reverence, Kathryn was supremely lacking.

How far this lack of reverence resulted from her husband's vacillating viewpoint, the doctor could not fathom. More than a little, he surmised. Had Brenton never wavered in his theology, Kathryn would have clung like a limpet to the bed-rock of her congenital Baptist faith. And yet, the doctor could not hold Brenton altogether responsible for Kathryn's development. The germs of mental cheapness were in Kathryn's nature, as were the germs of more or less illogical doubtings just as surely inherent in Scott Brenton's brain. He had increased the tendency, not created it.

Neither could the doctor quite make up his mind whether the two of them were conscious of the growing gulf between them. To begin with, he could not decide whether, on their wedding day, there ever had been any real spiritual tangency between them. Reed said not; but Reed had been young, at the time of his earlier acquaintance with them, and so incapable of forming any stable judgment. Knowing Brenton, it seemed incredible to the doctor that he could have been so supinely idiotic as to have allowed himself, against his will, to be gobbled up by Kathryn—for it was thus that Doctor Eustace Keltridge diagnosed their entrance into matrimony. However, the doctor lacked some knowledge of the determining factors in the case. He had no notion how Kathryn had spread her net before the idealistic young student who was too intent upon his personal problems, as concerned his choice of a profession and his duty to his mother, to heed the matrimonial pitfalls laid at his unwary feet.

However, that there was a gulf, and that an ever-widening one, between them was a fact to which the keen-sighted doctor could not blind himself. He was seeing much of the Brentons, during these winter weeks. Kathryn telephoned to him, almost daily, to consult him about her many ills, real or imaginary, about every ill, in short, to which feminine flesh was heir, from nervous palpitations of the heart down, or up, to housemaid's knee. The doctor longed to give her a downright piece of his mind. Instead, he gave her unmedicated sugar pills and as courteous attention as he could pull together. His old-time instinctive dislike of Kathryn was gathering point and focus, in these days, by reason of her increasing references to Claims, and the All-Mind, and to the fact that the pain in a neglected tooth was only a manifestation of cowardly unbelief. The doctor scented mischief in the glib phrases. He held his peace heroically, though, albeit now and then he longed to shake his babbling patient as the terrier shakes the rat.

Brenton also he saw constantly. Indeed, he made a point of it, urging the young rector to drop into the laboratory in his few off-hours, or waylaying him in the midst of a round of pastoral calls and dragging him out for a tramp across the ice-white fields. The river, after a time or two, he avoided. He did not like the metaphors which the sight of it called into Brenton's conversation. Indeed, it was far better for any man to go scrabbling up an icy slope, breathless and upon all fours, than to stand in a bleak up-valley wind and meditate upon the sliding ice cakes in an iron-gray stream. Health and a feeling for the picturesque by no means always walk hand in hand; and it was health the doctor sought for Brenton, during those winter walks, a mental health that could best be evoked from hard bodily exercise, rather than from communings with what Kathryn glibly termed the Great All-Mind.

Between the doctor and the increasing demands of parish work, Scott Brenton had very little time to spend at home. He would have mourned for this the more acutely, had Kathryn given any evidence of mourning on her side. Kathryn, however, was quite too busy sewing on preposterously small and preposterously frilly garments, quite too busy receiving pre-congratulatory calls from the women of the parish, to have any leisure left to bestow upon her husband. They met at meals; now and then they had an evening hour together, an hour when the chain of talk sagged heavily, broke, and fell into a sea of silence. Then either Kathryn wiped her eyes with ostentatious secrecy, arose and went away to bed; or else Brenton, after a furtive glance or two in the direction of her head, bent down above her sewing, stole out of the room as noiselessly as he was able and betook himself to the study where, often and often, the light burned almost till dawn.

At the table, it was rather better. They could offer each other things to eat, and talk about the vagaries of the present cook who, under the best of circumstances, was bound to be the past cook within a week or so. Scott could ask Kathryn if she had seen the morning paper; Kathryn could ask Scott if he knew old Mrs. Swan was likely to die, before the day was at an end.

Of any real talk about their personal relations to each other, of any but the most trivial reference to the great responsibility which now loomed close ahead of them: of this, there was nothing, nothing at all. Brenton would have loved to talk about it, to discuss it with his wife in perfect frankness, to show out to her in some small measure the overwhelming happiness that the outlook brought him, the wonderful and awful increase of personal responsibility. It would have given him untold pleasure to have gathered his wife into his arms, tight, tight, and held her there while, cheek pressed to cheek, they talked about the little stranger coming to their home, about the way they best could welcome him, and make him happy, and bring out all the best in him until his tiny person should become a hallowing influence within the home, a strengthening bond between them, man and wife.

Just once he had tried it, never afterwards. Kathryn had laughed self-consciously, had bade him Sh-h-h-h! Then she had given him a pecking sort of kiss, and had wriggled out of his arms. While she had rearranged her dismantled pompadour, suspiciously awry since her husband's unwonted caress, she had explained quite carelessly that he need not worry. Doctor Keltridge was looking out for her, and people said he was wonderful in cases of that kind, even if he was a gruff old thing. The nurse was all engaged. She was very old, too; but people said that she was the best in town. But, of course, a woman in her position would have everything possible done. Really, he need not worry in the least.

Brenton took the lesson to his heart; but he took it hard. It seemed to him a pity that all share in the great anticipation, full as it was of mingled fear and rapture and vast, vast responsibility, should be denied him. At the first, even knowing Kathryn as he did, he had looked for something else, had hoped that their loosening ties would tighten under the stress of the coming crisis. For Scott, beneath his proud reticence, his seeming blindness to the situation, was painfully aware of the gradual severance of interests between himself and Kathryn. This final lesson, though, rendered it unmistakable. Under its blow, his lined, lean cheeks whitened, his shoulders stooped a little more than usual when, after gently letting his wife go from his impetuous embrace, he turned away and sought his study. There, alone among the working tools of his profession, Scott Brenton first faced the realization that the extremest sort of separation is the one that goes on within the same four walls.

Drearily Brenton sat himself down in his cane-bottomed desk chair, shut his hands upon the edges of his blotting pad and stared the situation in the face. Life, to phrase it most unclerically, was distinctly a mess. It was going bad, going all the worse, apparently, because of the good intentions with which he himself had faced it. He really had meant well. He had chosen the profession on which his mother's hopes of happiness had been set. He had chosen the wife that she had put in his way; had been loyal to that wife in thought, and word, and deed. In short, he had done his crude, but level, best to keep at least two of the ten commandments, to say nothing of his less conscious struggles with the others. And what had happened? He and his profession were becoming incompatible. He and his wife were also becoming incompatible. The laws of science demanded that he seek the common factor, as source of the whole trouble. Therefore, he himself must be the sole cause of the wretched bungle Fate was making of his well-intentioned life. Was he so malevolent, or just futile? And which was the worse of the two alternatives?

Anyway, the fact was that he felt himself an outcast, a negligible bit of driftwood upon the tide of opportunity. His profession had found him a useless unbeliever. In the end, it would cast him out completely, a tattered remnant of a soul, riddled with doubts. His wife would be quite too well-mannered to do anything so radical as to cast him out; but she was finding him devoid of interest for her, was holding herself aloof from him, shutting him away from any real spiritual intercourse with her, and reducing him to the bread-and-butter level of a table-mate and nothing more. In the end, even, it might— Then Brenton shook his head, as he faced the fact that, in the end, it could not possibly be much worse than it was getting to be now. Of course, there was publicity to be avoided; but, on the other hand, publicity would bring a freedom from the strain of smiling jauntily at life, as though nothing really were amiss.

For Brenton realized with a disconcerting clearness that something was amiss, much, much amiss; realized, moreover, that he had known it vaguely all along. The trouble, albeit still nameless, had been there all the time, from the first day that he, smarting from the impact of the maternal slipper, had smarted yet more keenly beneath the lash of Catie's young disdain. From that time onward, whether she was Catie, Catia, or Kathryn, her attitude had been the same, always disdainful, always a little uncomprehending of his point of view. She had used himself and his profession as a sort of social ladder whereby to clamber upward. Always she had disdained the material of which the ladder was constructed. Now that she was successfully landed upon the desired level and needed its support no longer, would she kick it aside entirely, with one flick of her slippered foot? As for their marriage: what had it really been? A delicately hand-wrought bond? A machine-made manacle? Indeed, the latter, and unbreakable.

Brenton pulled himself up short, horrified at the abyss upon whose verge he found himself. He, the priest, vowed, despite his honest doubts, to the preaching of God's holy word and commandment, to be applying questions such as that to the marriage ties between himself and Catie! For, quite unconsciously, the swift revulsion flung him back upon the use of the old, almost forgotten name.

No marriage, honestly entered into, honestly lived out, could be a machine-wrought manacle. If it seemed one, then the greater shame to those who wore it, the greater shame to him, the husband, that his more crass nature could throw doubt upon the fineness of the texture of the bond. Besides, Kathryn was his wife, his lawful, loyal, albeit sometimes uncomprehending, wife. That fact alone was quite sufficient. Beyond it, there was no need to probe. Kathryn and he were one; the sacred seal of joint parentage was soon to be placed upon their union, rendering it more permanent, more holy. If they had their trivial disagreements, what then? It was the place of him, the stronger, the steadier, to end them for all time. Even while they lasted, he was a priest and bound to patient service, not a fiction-monger, like little Prather, nosing about in every situation that arose, with the faint hope of picking up an occasional crumb of melodramatic copy. He was a priest, a man not so much of words as of holy life. And the way to priestly holiness did not lie along the hummocks of domestic squabbles.

Brenton lifted his head, shut his teeth a little sidewise, straightened his shoulders, and went in search of Kathryn.

But Kathryn, going off to bed, had locked her door behind her. However, had the priestly eye been properly applied to the keyhole, it would have made out the reassuring fact that Kathryn, sleeping, showed the unruffled countenance of a contented babe.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

In the fulness of time, the Brenton baby came, a sturdy little youngster who, from the start, kicked lustily and lifted up his voice out of a pair of brazen lungs that made the domestic welkin ring. Kathryn, somewhat weak and very languid, opened her eyes listlessly, when the nurse approached the bed, the new-born heir, swaddled and shrieking, in her capable arms.

"Here's the baby, Mrs. Brenton!" she announced, and there was as much triumph in her tone as if it were the first child of her forty years' experience in nursing, not the last.

"Thank you, nurse. I'm sure she's very nice. And will you please tell Mr. Brenton," for Scott still was rigidly barred out from the room; "that I think we'll name her Katharine—"

"But, ma'am—"

Imperious in spite of her weakness, Kathryn ignored the attempted interruption.

"—Katharine, for me and for my grandmother."

"But, Mrs. Brenton, it's a boy."

Kathryn gave a start of indignation.

"Nurse, how stupid! Of course, it is a little girl."

But the nurse responded stolidly,—

"It aint, though; it's a boy."

Kathryn's eyes drooped wearily.

"Well, never mind about that now. There must be some mistake, though, for my heart was set on having a little girl. Anyway, you can tell Mr. Brenton it's all right. And now, nurse, I think I'll try to take a nap."

"And shall I leave the baby, ma'am?"

Kathryn, already settling her cheek upon her hand, stirred wearily.

"Certainly not, nurse, if he's going to cry like that," she said, with querulous decision.

That was late at night. Next morning, she aroused herself to some slight show of interest as concerned the child.

"It's such a disappointment to have him a boy," she still lamented. "Boys' clothes are so very ugly. However," lifting herself up upon her elbow, she stared down at the puckered face in the nest of soft white flannel; then she fell back again with a little shiver of disgust; "for the matter of that, nurse, he's very ugly, too."

This time, the nurse felt herself justified in indignant remonstrance. Indeed, in all her forty years of nursing, she never had been in contact with a mother who was so unappreciative.

"Ugly, Mrs. Brenton!" Her voice gathered force and fervour, as she went on. "How can you say so? He's a puffic' fibbous."

This time, however, the nurse's zeal outran discretion. "Fibbous" or no, the baby certainly was red to a fault, his infant brow was crowned with a rampant thatch of jet black hair, and no nonagenarian ever was one half so wrinkled as this small stranger in the halls of time. Even Scott Brenton, his heart thrilling and throbbing with the fearful new joys of his paternity, experienced an unmistakable chill, when first he gazed upon the countenance of his new-born son. Of course, he must be beautiful. Every young baby is that, ex officio. Nevertheless, Scott Brenton, looking at him, was fully conscious that he would become yet more beautiful, once he had been bleached a little, to say nothing of having had some of the puckers straightened out. And, besides, he was so curiously invertebrate, had such a tendency to coil himself to the likeness of a shrimp. In time, beyond a doubt, he would come out all right. For the present moment, though, he was a trifle problematic in his attractions.

"What shall we call him, Catie?" Scott asked her gently, the second night after the boy was born.

Her frown was petulant.

"Catie!" she echoed. "Why can't you call me Katharine, Scott? It is so much more dignified than that old baby name. I'd meant to call our baby by it, really call her by it, not by some uncouth nickname. Yes. I know I was baptised Catie; but so you were baptised Walter. We both of us, you see, have something to forget. Any way, I am determined to save the baby so much, so I want to take plenty of time to choose a good name for him. There's no hurry, for the present." She was silent, for a moment. Then she added, with rare tact, "I do so hope that, in course of time, he will improve a little in his looks. Nurse says that now he is just the image of you. No, nurse. I don't believe I want him in here. Really, he does make the bed very warm."

Indeed, from the first hour of his advent, that was her attitude towards the baby boy. As a piece of her own property, she tolerated him; she assumed it, as a matter of course, that in herself alone should be vested all rights of dictatorship over him. But when, in any way, he interfered with her personal comfort, she handed him over to the safe keeping of his nurse. And the nurse received him with a gratitude unblunted by her forty years' experience of similar babies. She coddled him, and dandled him, and rubbed his little backbone, and whispered into his disregarding ears over and over again that he was a itty-bitty puffic' fibbous, whatever that mamma of his might think about it. He was a puffic' fibbous; and she knew.

Despite what seemed to Brenton the exceeding ugliness of his small son, he took an infinite delight in his society. From the first day on, he persecuted the nurse with inquiries as to the child's condition, persecuted her, too, with insistent offers of help in administering to the baby needs. By the half-hour at a time, the rector of Saint Peter's, leaving his parish in the hands of the new curate whose advent had been simultaneous with that of the baby boy, hung above the frilly basket in which his small son either lay in a placid doze, or else contorted himself and shrieked discordantly.

It was a great day for Brenton, a red-letter day, when first the child was laid across his blanket-covered knees, while the nurse stood by, uttering many cautions and forcibly adjusting the angles of the clerical elbows, the better to support their tiny burden. Then she backed off, and stood gazing down upon the two of them adoringly.

"A puffic' fibbous!" she ejaculated. "And, what's more, the puffic' image of his popper!"

But, by this time, Scott Brenton felt no chill at the suggestion of the likeness of this pink and curly little being to himself. The baby was four days old; already he seemed to Brenton to have curled his rosy little self into his father's inmost heart. Already, too, the father was learning the mingled joy and pain of looking towards the future: the joy of anticipating all that his boy might become, the pain of knowing how fast and how irrevocably the baby days were passing on. He longed to see his child a full-grown man, a happier, better man than he himself had ever been. He also longed to hold fast to each one of the hours of babyhood, to keep them from slipping out from actual existence into the vague horizon of more or less distant memory.

And then, one day, a new thought struck him. What if, in time, the child slipped, too? That night, he walked the study floor till dawn. Next day, he went to see Professor Opdyke in his private laboratory. All this time, he had been lavishing his entire stock of pity upon Reed. He knew better now, saw things by far more clearly. The almost imperceptible weight across his blanket-covered knees had been enough to open a new vein of understanding, a dawning realization of just what it was that the past year had brought to Professor Opdyke, as much, indeed, as to Reed, his son. He went to see Professor Opdyke and, after blundering through the inevitable vague preliminaries, he came directly to the point and, out of his six days' experience of fatherhood, he gave to the professor a sympathetic comfort hitherto denied him.

It was the first of many similar lessons Brenton received from the warm contact of the shrimp-like bundle on his knees, the first and therefore memorable. It was also memorable for quite another reason: the renewal of his intimacy with the professor and the private laboratory.

Of late, this intimacy had been dropping out of sight a little. Whatever time that Brenton took for visiting the Opdykes, quite as a matter of course he had been lavishing on Reed. It never had occurred to him till now that, quite as much as Reed, Reed's father might be needing the tonic of outside visitations, the stimulus of contacts alien to his daily cares, the sympathetic comradeship of an individual able to arouse him from the alternate contemplation of his official duties at the college and of the sombre cloud hanging above his home. All at once, it came to Brenton that the professor himself might also be a candidate for sympathy, a grateful recipient of diverting conversations which did not focus themselves entirely upon Reed. The first experimental visit to the private laboratory proved to be such an entire success that others followed it until, by degrees, Brenton slid back into his old fashion of spending many of his odd hours among the balances and test-tubes, among the old, familiar sights, the smells so wholly unforgettable.

At any other time, under any other circumstances, the spell of the place would not have been one half so potent. Now, in the intimacy evoked by hour-long discussions of their sons' possible futures, the professor was coming to take a dominant place in Brenton's life. After preaching what he felt to be unprovable futilities, it was no small satisfaction to Brenton to come into contact with a man whose sane and practical working creed was supported by a perfect trestlework of interlocking equations based, in their turn, on fundamental and well-proved natural laws. After attributing the erratic courses of humanity to the caprices of an all-wise, but slightly captious, Creator, it was very good to sit and discuss them with a comrade who insisted upon reducing them all to rule and order, who declared, and also proved past all gainsaying, that nothing ever really happened, that the very thing which man calls chance is only another name for his blindness to some link connecting the event and cause. Even the shrimp-like propensities of his small son. Even the flat, flat figure stretched out on the couch, up-stairs at home. The Creator did not do just the thing itself, in sheer and potent wantonness. He merely laid down the laws. One followed them implicitly; or else, like every law-breaker, got punished.

And the look of the place; the old, old fascinating reek of it; the click of glass on glass; the whirring flare of freshly-lighted Bunsen burners! In vain Brenton tried his best to deaden his senses to the lure of it; but it was of no use. The charm was in his blood; it would not down. The smell of hydrogen sulphide was dearer to him than any incense; his fingers shut upon the test-tubes with a greedier clutch than any they had ever given to The Book of Common Prayer. And yet, by some curious mental process, that book of prayer, its age-old liturgies, never rang more sonorous in his mind than when they echoed in his ears above the whirring of the Bunsen burners. Science was his passion, not theology; but science aroused in him a spirit of reverential worship for his Creator as mere theology had never done. He caught himself, one day, even, with his eyes glued fast to the professor's deft manipulations, while he himself was saying, half aloud,—

"The Lord is in His holy temple." And then, next in line, "When man doeth that which is lawful, he shall save his soul alive."

Law everywhere! And then, quite as a corollary, life! But how dared he, how dared any man, preach from a pulpit, when it was given to him to toil in a laboratory, instead? Which was the greater reverence: to exploit one's own belief; or, open-minded, to be searching for a clearer outlook upon truth? And so, bit by bit, the lure of the laboratory beckoned to Scott Brenton, just as, bit by bit, his wife and his profession lost their hold upon him; lost it, to his regret, lost it by their own failure to supply his highest needs. As to the laboratory itself and all it offered, it was no mean achievement for it to make good to Brenton all the other lacks, whether in his professional career, or in his wife herself. Indeed, he turned to science, his first great love, as some other men might have turned to the wooing society of a stage soubrette. As the weeks went on, and the tentacles of his priesthood, coming into contact with his doubts and failing to penetrate them, by slow degrees relaxed their grip on him, by those same slow degrees, he felt his manhood yielding to the insistent demands of nature's law upon her votaries. As yet, however, he had no realization that now the ultimate result was but a matter of time. Professor Opdyke realized it, though, quite clearly; and he laid his plans accordingly.

Meanwhile, between the insistent interests that centred in his son, and the persistent efforts of the professor to make good all other lacks, Scott Brenton was finding life a saner and a happier thing than he had ever dreamed. Even his doubtings almost ceased to sting him, nowadays. A Creator whose achievements ran throughout the gamut from the actions of a bit of sodium flung into a dish of water, up to the intricate brain processes of a baby just beginning, as the phrase is, to take notice: surely a Creator capable of that was not likely to bungle His plans and be driven to reconstruct them now and then, either by miraculous intervention, or by thrusting a brake between the cogs of the revolving wheels of everlasting law. If the baby boy absorbed the contents of his bottle too fast for his good, he had a wholly consequent stomach ache. If Reed Opdyke tried conclusions with black powder and with lumps of loosened rock, he was laid on his back, with uncompromising promptness. In neither case was there a question of bringing distress upon the children of men, willingly or unwillingly. They brought it on themselves; theirs was the fault. As well blame a railway engine for running over the well-meaning individual who lies down on the track to rest and meditate on higher things, as blame the natural law with which men tamper. The All-Wise shows His goodness to His creatures in that He has laid down law of any sort, not left the universe to chance and wilful freakishness. As for gospel, the essential thing to preach was the duty of living according to the law. After all, it was living, not belief, that counted in the end of everything.

And, all that spring and early summer, it was living that Scott Brenton preached. He left to his new curate all the insisting upon proper points of doctrine. He himself took as his sole concern the thing he felt most vital, life itself. And, as the weeks went on, perchance in consonance with his new doctrine concerning man's grip on life eternal, perchance by reason of his greater enjoyment of life temporal, Brenton grew stronger, infinitely more alert, infinitely more virile in his magnetism. The old, limp husk, partly of heredity, in part of starved existence, was falling off from him. More and more plainly, as it fell, there stood revealed to all who had the eyes to see, the nervous figure of the man within.

Even Katharine felt the change instinctively, although, nowadays, she was too absorbed in realizing her identity with the All-Mind, with proving that suffering was nothing in the world but absent-minded sin, to pay any great attention to so concrete a matter as her husband's improved appetite and better sleep. Katharine, by now, had come to the point where she was beginning to dispense with the services of Doctor Keltridge in any minor crisis; and, instead, to sit and meditate upon the crisis, with a black-bound, fine-print, much-begilded volume open on her knee. As always, Katharine reckoned shrewdly. If an ordinary five-dollar copy of her new spiritual check-book upon the bank of health were potent to subdue any sort of pains from indigestion to a raging tooth, then a ten-dollar binding super-added ought, of a surety, to be able to cope with tuberculosis or the hookworm. Therefore she had chosen to fortify herself once and for all.

Meanwhile, the little table beside her bed-head was fast heaping itself with small books of devotion, books from which the old-time cross was conspicuously absent. At present, it was taxing all her ingenuity, all the fervour of her new belief, to make its tenets tally with her young son's attitude concerning colic, doubtless because, at some point or other, he had escaped from perfect contact with the All-Mind, the Healer. Some noxious claim or other still held good over him, despite her efforts to eradicate its malignant influence. It was disappointing. Still, as yet she was merely a novice in the great order of the new religion; and she only wondered at the swift hold her untrained mind had gained upon the pliant body of her husband.

Katharine smiled contentedly above her open book. Strange that she ever could have cherished the false notion that she and Scott were alien in their natures! Rather not! They both were ultra-scientific, fundamentally alike. As yet, of course, Scott did not spell his science with an X; but that was bound to come. How could it be otherwise, indeed, when his mere carnal appetite for bacon and dry toast had multiplied itself by ten, as result of her devotion to the book now lying open on her knee? It would be so very good, when she had brought her own husband to her way of thinking. For Scott was still her husband, still in a sense her property; therefore he still was dear to her, after her selfish fashion. His acceptance of her standards would be infinitely good; infinitely better would be the knowledge that she herself had converted him to their acceptation. And after Scott?

Katharine's prominent and shallow eyes grew hazy with the greatness of her thoughts, the while she meditated upon the wider field of labour offered her in the person of Reed Opdyke. Glorious indeed would be the conversion and the consequent cure of a desperate case like that! It would be a brilliant vindication of her science from the slanders of that decreasing number who persisted in ignoring the prefatory X.

Katharine's eyes grew yet more dreamy, above the open pages of her book. If courage were only hers, and patience, it all would come to her in the fulness of time.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The new curate, meanwhile, was having, in vulgar parlance, the time of his whole life. He was young, ritualistic, and he had a tendency towards being lungish. Therefore his devoutness was excessive. His rector, moreover, had a trick of preaching upon the practical issues of the day, while he left to his assistant the driving home the points of doctrine. And the assistant did drive them home most lustily and with resounding whacks, until the sedate walls of old Saint Peter's echoed with the blows, and the congregations gathered in old Saint Peter's danced with the pain of the prickings. The mere presence of a pin is not sufficient to produce any callousness of mind or body. Saint Peter's had never doubted the force or the efficiency of its doctrines; but it was at least a generation since it had been so rowelled with their points.

One such rowelling had just been taking place when, on the Sunday morning following the Easter holidays, Dolph Dennison dropped in to see Reed Opdyke. As he more than half expected, he found Olive Keltridge there ahead of him, and it was upon Olive Keltridge that, after a most unceremonious greeting to his host, Dolph turned the fire of his interrogation.

"Who is the expensive-looking gentleman in the bunny hood, Olive, the one that sat back in the corner and kept tabs on Brenton's reading of the lessons?"

Olive laughed at the undeniable accuracy of the description.

"That's the new curate, Dolph. You must have seen him before."

"Not," Dolph responded briefly. "It wouldn't be possible to forget him. What's he for? Ornament? I must say, Saint Peter's is getting frilly in its hoary age, and frills like that come dear."

"Not so dear as he looks," Olive reassured him. "In reality, he comes cheap. He is just up from nervous prostration and ordered to a more relaxing climate, so we got him at a bargain."

"Damaged goods. I see. Seen him, Opdyke? Hood and all—it's of white bunny—he looks like the tag-end of an importer's mark-down sale, and his idioms match the rest of him. Where'd they get him, Olive? Not your father?"

"My father didn't get him, if that is what you mean, Dolph. Mr. Prather, I believe it was, who recommended him."

"Prather for all the world! Just like the man; he is always on the still hunt for something a little bit exotic. Next thing we know, we'll be having the reverend gentleman served up to us in a novel. But why the bunny? It is no end unmerciful, a day like this, as hot as ermine, and without any of the glory."

"What does a curate do?" Reed queried. "Besides putting on the hood, I mean, and lugging round the cakes for tea, in English novels."

"This one leads all the responses, and sometimes he leads them a little bit ahead of time," Dolph enlightened him. "Besides that, he keeps his lean forefinger on the word that Brenton happens to be reading, ready to help him out on the pronunciation, if it is necessary. Between whiles, he counts up the congregation and divides it by ten, to make sure that he gets the right amount of offertory. Really, he works hard."

"You might also mention that he preaches," Olive added.

Dolph chuckled.

"I wasn't sure that's what you'd call it. It seemed to me a long way more like administering a verbal spanking. Is that his chronic method, Olive?"

But Reed cut in.

"I can testify on that score. Sometimes he is only tenderly regretful, and that is any amount worse. He came prowling in, one day; I suppose he thought it ought to be his proper function, and the maid took fright at his canonicals and let him up. Usually she heads off strangers; but this fellow was too much for her."

"And you let him stay?" Dolph's voice was incredulous.

"What could I do? I couldn't very well arise and escort him to the door; neither could I fling a boot at him, when he came in. No; I told him I was very well, I thanked him—in reality, it was one of my grilling days—and then, as soon as I heard his accent, I had the brilliant inspiration of shouting to the maid to bring some tea. The creature poured it for himself, with any amount of cream. Then he sat down, with his toes turned in, and took his cup on his right knee and prepared to make merry."

"And you joined in?"

"Sotto voce, as it were." Reed laughed at the memory. "You see, I had to be properly lugubrious, to tally up to his impressions of what I ought to be. He had been here just a week, then, and he had me down pat. Somebody must have coached him grandly, and he's the sort who revels in woe and in consequent and ghostly consolation."

Olive's eyes were fixed upon the view outside the window.

"Poor old Reed! And then?"

"Then?" Opdyke shot her a glance of merry mockery. "That night, after he had trundled me off to bed, Ramsdell stood and gazed down at me with a new respect. 'I must say, Mr. Hopdyke,' he told me; 'you 'ave been in grand form, hall this evening. I never 'eard you do any finer swearing in hall the time I've been with you.'"

"And that comes of a moral influence!" Dolph laughed. "If that's the way he is going to affect sinners, Brenton will have his hands full, following up his curate's trail."

"Brenton is of different stuff," Reed made crispy comment.

"Have you noticed the change in Mr. Brenton since the baby came, Reed?" Olive inquired abruptly.

"I've hardly seen him. From all accounts, he is devoting most of his spare time to my father. What is the baby like, Olive?"

"Ugly as sin; but Mr. Brenton believes him an Adonis."

"What about the mother?"

"Eddyizing fast."

"What?" The word burst simultaneously from both the men.

"Didn't you know? Yes, it is a malignant case. I only hope it won't go round the family."

"Babies are holy, and therefore immune; Brenton has too much sense. But is it a fact, Olive?" Opdyke questioned.

"It evidently is a fact that you are a poor, shut-in invalid, and not brought up to date in local gossip," Olive told him tranquilly. "I can't see how you have missed hearing of it, Reed, even if it did escape my mind. Yes, it seems to be a fact that everybody is questioning and nobody is disputing. Of course, though, nobody is in a position to testify absolutely."

"Your father?"

"She has dismissed him. At least," and Olive corrected herself with ostentatious care; "she says that her health no longer needs him, although she always shall value him greatly as a well-tried friend."

Opdyke pondered. Then he said,—

"The d—"

"Arling!" Dolph made hasty substitution. "But I fancy he is well-tried, all right, if he has had to dance professional attendance on her. Where'd she catch it, Olive?"

"Nobody knows. My father says it is like any other germ, floats around in the air and is harmless, until it lights on some degenerate tissue. But then, he never did like Mrs. Brenton."

"The question is," Dolph said, with sudden gravity; "will Brenton get it? I'd rather he'd be afflicted with curacy than with this other thing."

"Curacy?" Olive questioned. "What's that?"

"Acting like this curate chap, and giving his congregation red-hot pap for their Sabbatic food. At least, that's curable; the other isn't."

But Reed shook his head. Despite his unvarying point of view, he knew Scott Brenton better.

"You don't need to worry about Brenton," he assured them. "He has some common sense and a little logic; both things render him immune."

Dolph settled back in his chair and crossed his legs.

"Yes, Olive, I intend to outstay you," he said, in answer to her glance. "You were here first; it's your turn to go now. But about this latest freak of Mrs. Brenton: where do you suppose she picked it up?"

"Evolved it from within."

"Doubted. I've talked to her, Opdyke; she's not the kind to evolve anything, certainly not a full-fledged case of—"

Olive interrupted.

"There is some good in it, though," she persisted.

"Where?" Opdyke asked her.

"The complexion; it's better than any amount of massage. One never wrinkles, when one is convinced that nothing can go wrong."

"What about measles?" Dolph demanded pertly.

But Reed objected to the trivial interlude.

"I wish I knew how Brenton really would be taking it," he said, rather more insistently than it was his wont to speak. "The poor beggar has had bad times lately with his Ego; always has had, in fact. He has an enormous conscience, linked with an insatiate desire to put the whole universe under a blowpipe, and then weigh up the residue. That's infernally bad for a preacher, especially when he has a wife who is strong neither in her cooking nor in her sense of humour. Yes, I know something about Mrs. Brenton, even if I haven't seen her lately. Besides, I shall see her, some day. She is still clamouring at my portal; it's only a matter of time now, before she downs the outer guards and gets in."

"Reed, you won't allow it!" Olive said quickly, for she thought she was aware what such a call portended.

Opdyke's smile was grim.

"The inner fortress is invincible, Olive, so don't worry. I sha'n't encourage the maid to let her in. Still, if she breaks through, at least it will keep her out of mischief in other quarters, and I am a long way more invulnerable than Brenton."

"They say," Dolph remarked at the opposite wall; "that it is a perfectly grand thing for the temper."

Olive answered without a trace of malice, so intent was she upon the question at issue.

"Really, Dolph, I think she isn't cantankerous. Quite selfish people never are; they just grab everything in sight, with a total serenity and regardless of any consequences. That is the reason Mrs. Brenton is such a good subject for her new religion."

Reed roused himself from a brown study.

"If you meet Brenton anywhere, Olive, don't you want to ask him to come in to see me soon? I've some things I want to say to him; not about this, of course. Yes, I could telephone, Dennison; but I hate to interrupt him, when he is in his study at the church; and, at the house, there's always the danger of calling out Mrs. Brenton. Going? I wish you wouldn't. Still," and the brown eyes sought the window; "I can't blame you, such a day."

"Oh, Reed, don't!" Olive said hastily, as she bent to take his hand. "It makes us seem so selfish. When will the time ever come that you can go, too?"

Reed shut his lips. Although, of late, both he and Olive had dropped their reticence and faced squarely and without evasion the facts of his long imprisonment, even with Dolph, the mention of it hurt him acutely. Dolph, that day, was so astonishingly alert, so scrupulously charming in his Sunday trim, such a contrast to himself, flattened out under a plaid steamer rug whose fringe persisted in getting into his mouth at times, and with his wavy hair a little disarranged across his forehead. Ramsdell was invaluable; but, after all, he was nurse primarily, not valet. But, as for Dolph, he was a thing of beauty and, what was more, a thing of life, not a soggy bundle like himself. Indeed, he was a fit comrade for Olive.

Despite his blithe farewell, Reed's brown eyes drooped heavily, after he had watched the two of them pass out of sight around the corner of the doorway. Good comrades? Yes. The thin lips lost their steadiness, quivered a little, then opened, to send an answer out to the final hail that came back to him from the hall below. A moment afterward, the chin quivered, even as the lips had done, and something glittered on the long brown lashes.

"Ramsdell?" Reed said, a little later.

"Yes, sir."

"How long have you been working on this thing?"

"Eleven months and a 'alf, sir."

"Have I made any gain at all?"

"Ye—es, sir. Oh, yes."

Reed smiled grimly.

"How much am I going to keep on gaining?"

"Well, sir," Ramsdell's accent was supposed to be encouraging; "you see, there's always 'ope, sir."

"I'm glad of so much. Well, never mind about that now. I want to send a telegram. Please get the blanks."

With Ramsdell seated by his side, blanks in one hand, fountain pen in the other, Opdyke paused to consider.

"Well, there's no use beating about the bush. I may as well go straight to the point. Ready, Ramsdell? All right. To H. P. Whittenden, Seven, Blank Street, New York City. Sure you've got that right? All right. Then: Getting badly bored and losing grip fast. Come pull me out. Opdyke. That's all, Ramsdell. Send it off, to-night."

Next afternoon, Whittenden came, to all seeming the same unspoiled, curly-headed youngster who had helped to open Brenton's eyes, so long ago, to the real good there was in life, despite the melancholy teachings of his early Calvinism. The professor was busy with a class, Mrs. Opdyke had a cold; and so it came about that Olive, dropping in, that morning, and hearing of the dilemma, offered to drive down to meet the guest.

"You always were a comfort, Olive," Reed assured her gratefully. "You've a general-utility sort of disposition that seems to balk at nothing, and therefore we all impose upon you. Sure you don't mind? You can't miss Whittenden. I've told you too many things about him, and he looks exactly the sort of man he is."

Olive did not miss him. More than that, she used the fifteen minutes of their drive together to impress upon the guest's mind the salient facts of Reed's history during the past eleven months, facts largely of the spirit, not a mere physical chronology.

"And the worst of it all is," she said, as she drew up at the Opdyke gate; "we none of us, however much we care for him, however hard we try, can get inside the situation and share it with him. He is bound to go through it, all alone. That is the most maddening phase of the whole thing."

But Whittenden, looking into her brown eyes, had his doubts of that. Before he went to bed, that night, his doubts were even greater.

As a matter of fact, neither Reed Opdyke nor his guest slept very much, that night. Indeed, they scarcely went to bed at all. Ramsdell, dozing in the next room, fully dressed, to be in call when Opdyke needed to be put into bed, had a hazy idea that the evening was eighteen hours long and that both the men talked throughout it, without pause. The truth of the matter was, however, that the pauses were both long and frequent, those quiet times which come across a conversation full of mutual understanding. At the start, there had been a good deal to say on both sides. It was the first time the two men had met since Opdyke's accident; an experience such as that can never fully be explained by letters, especially when, on one side, the letters have to be dictated to a man like Ramsdell, sounder of heart than of orthography. Reed slurred over most of the details of the accident, even now. What he did not slur over, what he had summoned his friend to hear, was the record of the months that had come after, a record which, for just the once, he allowed himself to paint in its true colours, dull, dun gray, and deep, deep black.

"That's all, Whittenden," he said abruptly at last. "I suppose I might have gone about it a little bit more tersely; but, the fact is, I haven't been letting myself rehearse it often. It's bad for the audience."

"And almighty good for you," the curly-headed rector said tranquilly. "Mind if I smoke, Reed?"

"Of course not. Sorry I can't join you. It's forbidden fruit, like most other things, these days." He lay very still, for a while. Then he looked up, with the ghost of his accustomed smile. "Well, what do you make out of it all, Whittenden? You've heard and seen the worst of me. Now what next? Is this losing my grip the final stage of the whole bad matter?"

Whittenden flung up one lean hand to grasp the chairback above his head. Then he smoked in silence for a time, his clear eyes fixed on Opdyke's face. At last, he spoke.

"Reed, it sounds infernally like preaching, and you know I draw the line at that, except from the pulpit. However, I don't know why, even if one is a preacher, it's not as decent to quote Bible as to quote Shakespeare; and there's one sentence that keeps coming into my head, while I watch you, about losing your life and finding it again. You may think you've lost your grip on yourself; but, from your own showing, you've gained a lot of grip on your friends, and I'm not sure that may not count fully as much, in the long run. As for the bore of it, I can't much wonder. I'd go mad, myself, laid out here like a poker, and left, half the day, to ponder on the things I hadn't had time to finish doing. But, for the rest of it—Reed, I knew you in what you are pleased to call your palmy days. They were palmy, too; it must have hurt like thunder to be plucked out of them. And yet," the clear eyes swept from the topmost wave of brown hair down across the intent face, so curiously alive, down across the inert body, so curiously dead; "and yet, I'll be hanged if I don't believe you are more of a man, more of an active force, than you were then."

"Impossible." Reed spoke briefly.

"Why?" The answer was as brief.

"I don't see a dozen different people in a month, Whittenden. You've no idea how few there are who—"

"Who take the trouble to come up your stairs? Exactly. Of course, there are some others who'd be glad to come, and don't dare. There are also some others who would be glad to come, and who probably would kill you, if they did. Still, granted the solitary dozen: force isn't a thing one measures by the acre, Reed. It is deep, not wide. Therefore your dozen are enough."

"But why the dozen? They come to play with me. I don't do anything to them."

"No?" Whittenden spoke with his eyes on his cigar. "Ask Ramsdell. Ask Brenton. Ask—" he turned his eyes on Opdyke; "Miss Keltridge."

With a sudden gesture, Opdyke flung his arm across his brow and eyes.

"Don't!" he said, and his voice sounded stifled.

Deliberately his friend bent forward, took away the shielding arm, and looked down into Opdyke's eyes unflinchingly.

"Reed, you must not let yourself get morbid," he said steadily. "God knows there's every reason that you should; and yet, once you do, the game is up. This is a thing you must face squarely, and remember, while you face it, that not one life is concerned, but two." Then he let go the arm, which went back to the old position, and, for a time, the room was very still.

"Old man," Whittenden said, after a longish interval of smoking and watching the shielded face; "I know I'm not much use; but doesn't it help a little to know I'm here, and sick with the seeing for myself all that this thing means to you? Of course, I had the letters; but they didn't go far. One has to come and talk it out; and—Well, I'm here."

Then the arm came down, and the heavy eyes met Whittenden's.

"That's why I sent for you," Reed said. "I wanted you."

Ramsdell, in the next room, had quite a little doze, before once more the voices waked him.

"You see," Reed said at last, as if there had been no pause at all; "I was a little in the state those fellows were in, up at the mine. I needed something equivalent to their extreme unction. The cases are analogous; though, after all, I am not sure it would be quite as hard to die into the next world as I'm finding it to die out of this."

Whittenden's clear eyes flickered. Then he braced himself and asked the direct question to which his friend, for two long hours, had been so plainly leading.

"Reed, do you mean this thing is—permanent?"

"Yes."

"You know it for a fact?"

"Yes."

"Since when?"

"A month or so."

"They told you?"

"No. They still keep up the fiction that they can't predict anything with any surety."

"Then how do you know?"

"How does anybody know it, when more than half of himself is just so much dead matter; when the division line between the dead part and the alive doesn't move along by so much as one hair's breadth; when the dead part is dead past any resurrection? It is my body, Whittenden. I know it for a fact."

There was no especial answer to be made. Whittenden had the superlative good sense to attempt none. After a silence, Reed spoke again.

"I haven't told anybody of it yet, till now. There was no use, and I dreaded the row they'd be sure to make. Besides, I wanted to tell you, first of all, because you are the one man in reach who has seen me in the thick of things, and I knew there would be any amount of detail you would take in, without my having to explain it to you."

The rector nodded. Through his curling smoke-trails, it seemed to him he caught a glimpse of the rugged, ragged Colorado mountains, of a shabby mining camp centring in a group of shafts, of squads of rough-faced miners, and of Reed Opdyke, smiling and alert, striding here and there among them, laying down the law superbly, a king among his loyal and adoring subjects. And now—Whittenden flung back his head, and his clear eyes glowed with his belief. Never more a king than now, as he lay there, quiet, but very potent, establishing his throne above the level of the powers of darkness who murmured threateningly about his feet! And, meanwhile,—

"Queer thing about our bodies," Reed was saying; "queer and almost a little cruel. We drive them at top speed and never think a thing about them, as long as they go on all right. It's when they snap, that we begin to realize all the things they've stood for."

Again there came the silence, while the eyes of the two men rested on each other, more eloquent than many words. At last, Reed spoke again.

"It's all hours, Whittenden. I've been a beast to keep you up; still, it is a relief to have it out and over. Now go to bed. Before you go, though—for now and then we all of us want something we can hang on to, and this is one of the times—I don't mean to funk my own share in the main issue; but, Whittenden, before you go off to bed, would you mind just saying the Our Father? It's some time since I've heard it, and, in this present muddle of my universe, I've a general notion it might be of help."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It was not until well on in the next day that the two men spoke of Brenton. Indeed, all their talk, next morning, was plainest platitude. Instinctively each of them realized that the other needed a little time to rally from the strain of the night before. Accordingly, though eight o'clock found them breakfasting together in Opdyke's room, Ramsdell, in attendance on his patient's numerous needs of help, acknowledged to himself that he never saw a patient and a priest act like such a pair of schoolboys squabbling over jam. Afterwards, Ramsdell dismissed and sent off on an errand, Whittenden smoked, and Opdyke lay and watched him in a contented reverie too deep for words. As he had said to Brenton, once on a time, it was a relief to get even a bad matter out and over. Later, he was quite well aware, he would take up the subject with his friend once more; but the week was nearly all before them. They could afford to rest a little, and let the healing silence fall between them.

Indeed, in all the morning, they exchanged a scanty dozen sentences. An occasional questioning glance, an inarticulate grunt of comprehension: after their long night vigil, this was all for which either of them felt inclined. In the meantime, Reed's face was losing somewhat of its look of strain; Whittenden's clear eyes were growing gentler, yet infinitely more full of courage. To both of them, the future was less of a blank wall than it had seemed, the night before. Already, they both were gathering a little more perspective.

Towards noon, though, Opdyke roused himself and spoke.

"This isn't going to do for you, Whittenden," he said, with decision. "If you sit about like this, I'll have you tucked up beside me, within the week. You've got to have some exercise. I'll set Ramsdell to telephoning on your behalf, if you will call him. Yes, I can telephone; but it's not too easy, so I generally pass the job on to him. Who'll you have for your escort: Olive Keltridge, or Brenton?"

"Brenton?"

"Scott Brenton. Surely, I wrote you he was here."

Whittenden laughed.

"If you did, it never got put in. Most likely Ramsdell balked at the spelling. You mean the Brenton that I married?"

"Yes, worse luck!"

The rector nodded.

"It's come to that; has it? I'm not too much surprised. What is he doing here?"

"Preaching, of course."

"No of course about it. He was more a physicist than anything else, it seemed to me. I had an idea he'd have gone in for teaching before now."

"Give him time."

"What do you mean?"

"I'd rather you saw for yourself. In fact, I think we'll give up any idea of Olive, for the afternoon, and telephone to Brenton to come and take you for a walk. Telephone him yourself, for that matter."

"He may be busy."

"Not he. He has a curate now to do his routine work, and he frisks about, a good deal as he pleases. Poor beggar! He takes his very frisking sadly, nowadays. And then, after you've nailed him, would you call up Olive, nine-two-three, and tell her I'm to be abandoned, all afternoon. She may take the hint."

"Shall you tell her things, Reed?"

"Not yet?" Reed spoke crisply.

"Why not? I fancy she'd be one to understand."

"So she would. She always does, always has done, ever since she was born, and we all take it out of her accordingly, a good deal as we take it out of you. However, I don't want her to know it, yet awhile. I'd prefer to understand the thing a little better, myself, before I pass it on. And, of course, you won't speak of it to Brenton?"

And Whittenden shook his head. He shook it with the more surety, because of his old-time memories of Brenton, the lank, ill-nourished youth with the crude manners and the lambent eyes. One did not tell things to a man like that; one merely listened, and then gave advice. That was really all. And then, his telephoning finished, Whittenden fell to wondering into what sort of a man Scott Brenton, the embryo, had turned. The voice was reassuring, also the accent. Both spoke of vast improvement in their owner.

Two hours later, Whittenden, balancing himself on the window sill at Opdyke's side, glanced down at the walk below him, as he heard a step draw near.

"You don't suppose that can be Brenton!" he exclaimed. "It looks like him; but, ye immortals, how he's changed!"

"Haven't we all?" Reed queried dryly.

"Not so much. Why, man, he's actually groomed, and he walks without stepping on the edges of his own boots. Brenton!" He leaned out of the window, calling like a boy, "Hi, Brenton! Is it really you?"

And so they met, after the years. Moreover, meeting, it was as if the years they had spent apart from each other, instead of increasing the distance between them, had brought them to a closer contact than any of which they hitherto had dreamed.

According to their former custom, they tramped for miles, that afternoon, and talked as steadily as they tramped. At first sight, Whittenden had been delighted at the change in his companion; at a second, the delight increased, and the wonder mingled with it. It was little short of the marvellous to the rector of Saint-Luke-the-Good-Physician's that the raw, eager-minded youngster he had known as clerklet in a mountain inn could have developed into this personable man, a good talker, a good critic of this world's valuations, and, withal, not a little magnetic in his personal charm. At the first glance and the second, Whittenden rejoiced at what he saw. At the third, he doubted. The eyes were lambent still, but far less happy; the lips were more sensitive, albeit firmer, and every now and then there came a tired droop about their corners, as if life, even to the prosperous and popular rector of Saint Peter's, were just a degree less full of promise than he had fancied it would be. The raw young stripling had hoped all things; the mature, seemingly well-poised rector was having some little difficulty to prove them good.

What was the matter, Whittenden asked himself. The ineradicable germs of pessimistic Calvinism? The uncongenial wife? Some lurking weakness in the man himself, that forbade his ever coming to a full content? Some residuum of jealous self-distrust, left over from his primitive beginnings, and causing him to look on every prosperous man as on a potential foe? The alternatives were too many and too complex to be settled by a two-hour study of the man beside him. Therefore Whittenden, being Whittenden, ended by putting the direct question.

"In the final analysis, Brenton, what are you making out of your life?"

The answer astounded him by its terse abruptness.

"Chaos," Brenton said.

Whittenden's mouth settled to the outlines of a whistle, albeit no sound came out of it.

"Chaos is a good, strong word, Brenton," he said, after a minute. "Exactly what is it that you mean?"

Brenton stated his meaning, without mincing matters in the least.

"I mean that I have no more business to be preaching in Saint Peter's than I would have to be holding forth upon the eternal fires of the most azure Calvinism."

"But you made your choice deliberately."

Brenton turned on him with some impatience.

"What if I did? What is the choice of a boy of twenty, anyway? Of a cocksure, ambitious boy just breaking out of leading strings? I did choose—and yet, not so freely as I seemed to do. There was my mother in the background."

"Of course," Whittenden assented quietly. "Who else, better?"

"No one. Only—" Then Brenton curbed his rising excitement. Just as of old, he felt the overmastering wish to talk things out with Whittenden; but his maturity shrank from the idea, as the untrained boy had never done. "Anyway," he went on quietly; "I made my choice. I still believe it was the best choice open to me at the time. The only trouble is that I outgrew it."

"Or it outgrew you," Whittenden suggested coolly.

The dark tide surged up across Scott Brenton's lean cheeks.

"Perhaps," he assented curtly. "Still, Whittenden, it doesn't seem that way to me. I feel myself tied down at every point."

"What ties you?"

"Creeds." Then Brenton laughed a little harshly. "Doubts, rather."

Whittenden looked him in the eyes.

"What is it that you're doubting, Brenton?" he inquired.

"Everything. All the old landmarks of the ages," Brenton told him restively.

Whittenden smiled.

"You had parted with some of them, when I last said good bye to you," he reminded Brenton. "You had quenched the sulphurous flames, and explained the more surprising of the miracles. You even had a doubt about creation's having been achieved in one hundred and seventy hours. What else has gone upon your conscientious scruples?"

"Most things, including a good share of the Thirty-Nine Articles," Brenton made curt answer. "Moreover, I have rewritten my early chapter in the Book of Genesis, until it says Like unto God, knowing, not Good and Evil, but the Law."

"Hm-m-m!" Whittenden said slowly. "That isn't quite as original as you may think for, Brenton. A good many of us others have employed that form of the phrase before. Still, there's no use in taking it for a sort of cudgel, to knock down the people who still cling to the dear old phrases. And they are good phrases, too. They deserve to be revered for their antiquity, and for the hold they have kept upon all mankind; still I don't, myself, see why you need to take them any more literally than you do some of those old resonant lines of Homer. It's the spirit of the thing we're after, not the barren phrases."

"Then what's the good of all your creed?" Brenton demanded shortly.

"Our creed," Brenton corrected him quite gently; more gently, even, than he had spoken to Reed Opdyke on the night before. Indeed, Scott Brenton seemed to him vastly more in need of gentleness than did Opdyke. His trouble was as deep-seated; moreover, it was complicated by a curious ingrained weakness which, Whittenden judged, it would be hard for him to down. In Opdyke's place, Brenton would have turned his face to the wall and made a long, long moan. In Brenton's position, Opdyke would have kept his flags flying gayly, as long as there was a tatter of them left.

Now, Brenton's accent showed that he resented the correction.

"Ours, if you will; at least, for the present. But, after all, what is the good?"

Whittenden's reply came promptly.

"A common platform, where we can stand side by side, while we are doing our individual work."

"But, if you don't believe in it?"

A sudden gleam of mirth came into Whittenden's clear eyes.

"Do you expect to put your foot on every single plank in any platform, Brenton? If you do, you'll need to have it built just to your measure. It seems to me that, in course of time, you'd find it a little lonely, to say nothing of the minor fact that people work together all the better for being on some sort of a common basis."

"But is work the only thing?" Brenton queried rather absently.

And the curly-headed rector by his side made swift, emphatic answer,—

"Yes."

"Then why—"

Whittenden interrupted him.

"What do you believe, Brenton? For any man is bound to have some shreds of belief; that is, as long as he keeps out of the nearest asylum for the incurable insane."

"My belief, or my profession?"

"Hang your profession!" Whittenden said impatiently. "Or else, hang on to it, and keep still. But it's your belief I want, your creed, your working platform."

"How do you know I have one?" Brenton asked rather irritably, for Whittenden's attitude was distinctly less satisfying to him than it had been of yore.

"Because I know the kind of men Saint Peter's has been accustomed to demand. Also because I have talked to Reed Opdyke."

"And Opdyke told you—"

"Nothing; beyond the mere fact that he is very fond of you. Opdyke doesn't care for many people; his very affection tells its story. Still, that is beside the point. What tag ends of belief have you got left?"

Even in its kindliness, the voice was masterful, the voice of the thoroughbred, when he gets in earnest. Brenton longed to stiffen himself against the mastery, but he could not. His ineffectual effort lent an edge of sarcasm to his tone.

"When the eye of the parish is upon me, I read out the Nicene Creed in the deepest voice at my disposal. When—"

"This is rather beneath your customary methods, Brenton," his companion interrupted him. "But go on."

Brenton's lips shut hard together for a minute. Then he did go on, and in a totally different voice.

"When I look myself squarely in the face, Whittenden, I find I can assent to just two points, no more."

"And they?"

"God. Universal law."

"So far, so good. And man?" Whittenden queried.

"Their corollary."

"Exactly." Whittenden walked on in silence for a little way. "Well, what else do you want, Brenton?" he inquired.

"Nothing. My people, however, want a great deal more."

"How do you know?"

"Our ritual."

"Can't you interpret it with any common sense?" The impatience again was manifest.

"Not in common honesty." And Brenton lifted up his chin.

A little laugh came to his companion's lips and eyes.

"Why not?" he queried. "You don't expect our public schools to abandon the Aeneid and Homer, because they don't consider the old mythologies accurate history. You don't expect to give up the best of Hafiz and Omar, because you also come in contact with the worst of them. We'd be poorer, all our lives, by just so much. In the same way, why can't you take the best of our theologies as fact and love it, and, at the same time, keep a certain respect for the rest of them that you don't believe, the sort of respect you give an aged ancestor, a respect for what they have been to the world at large, not for what they are now to you? Belief, in the last analysis, is nothing but well-applied common sense."

It was a long time before either of the men spoke again. In the end, Whittenden broke the silence.

"Brenton, I'd have given a good deal to have known your parents," he said.

"To weigh me up?" Brenton smiled. "You saw my mother: a strong, self-reliant, self-willed character, threaded through and through with Calvinism. She was totally unselfish, yet totally self-centred. In the same way, she was always on a battleground between the claims of her own rampant freewill and her sanctified belief in predestination. It's not an easy thing to analyze her."

"And your father?"

Brenton coloured hotly.

"I was only ten days old, when he died, Whittenden; but the tradition has come down to me. If he hadn't been so weak, so totally self-indulgent, he'd have been a genius. Even in the worst of his self-indulgence, he had ten times my mother's logic. If he had had one tenth of her will power, he'd have counted. As it was, though,—utter annihilation. He died, and left no record. My mother helped it on, by never mentioning him, up to the very day she died."

"Hm!" Whittenden said thoughtfully. "Perhaps she knows him better now."

Brenton glanced at him curiously.

"You still believe it?"

"Of course. No; no use arguing from the point of view of the biologist and chemist, Brenton. It won't do you any good, nor me any harm. It's in me; I don't know whence or wherefore, so save your breath and use it on other things. I think your ancestry is all accounted for. As to environment: what does your wife say about it?"

"The environment?" Brenton asked, a little bit perversely.

"No; the highly individualistic platform you are erecting for yourself? Are you to leave room there for her?"

"Hardly. She wouldn't mount it, if I did."

"Doesn't share the doubts?"

Brenton shook his head. As yet, he was loath to put into words the fact of his wife's adoption of her new creed. Appearances and his own forebodings to the contrary, it might be but a passing phase of her experience. The label of it, though, once affixed, would be well-nigh impossible of removal.

"Katharine has never come so very much inside my professional life," he paltered.

Whittenden pricked up his ears, partly at the statement, partly at the unfamiliar name. He had felt sure that he had heard "I, Scott, take thee, Catia." In his more mellow New York life, such transforming evolution was less common. However, names were a detail. It was the fact he challenged.

"Your wife? But how can she stay outside it, Brenton?"

"Oh, she's not outside it, in a sense. Before the boy came, she was in all the guilds and parish teas and that. Really," Brenton spoke with a blind optimism; "she was very popular. But, in the vital things one thinks and feels—Whittenden, I don't imagine any woman ever really can share those things with us men. We are created different. We can't go inside each other's shells."

And in that final utterance, it seemed to Whittenden, Scott Brenton voiced the saddest phase of all his present unbelief.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

"Still, Reed, I rather grudge the time," Whittenden said to his host when, dinner over, that same night, he flung himself into a chair at Opdyke's side. "For all practical purposes, it was a wasted afternoon. I'd much rather have been here with you."

"You'd have been quite de trop, old man. Olive Keltridge was here, two hours, and filled me up with all the gossip of the town. Besides, you were filling yourself up with ozone, and preparing to make a night of it. Apropos—Ramsdell!"

"Yes, sir?" Ramsdell appeared upon the threshold of the outer room.

"Go to bed, like a Christian, when you get ready. No need for you to become a martyr, because Mr. Whittenden and I wish to carouse till all hours. When I need you, Mr. Whittenden will come to wake you, and you can appear in your pajamas, if you choose. Isn't that all right, Whittenden? Good night, Ramsdell." Then, as Ramsdell vanished, Reed settled himself with a little sigh. "It's a fearsome responsibility, Whittenden," he said; "to win this sort of sheep-dog devotion. Ramsdell, on my grilly days, would like nothing better than to stand and let me shy things at his head. It is beautiful; but it gets a trifle sultry. A little downright cussedness helps to clear the air occasionally; but cussèd is the one thing Ramsdell isn't. I suppose it is because he is the product of the ages; it goes with his misplaced aspirates."

Whittenden struck a match.

"The sheep-dog thing is worth the having, though. Best hang on to it, Reed. It doesn't come to most of us too often."

Opdyke eyed him rather mirthfully.

"What's the matter, man?" he queried. "Did your own sheep dog growl at you, this afternoon?"

"Mine?"

"Brenton. He counts you as the great formative influence of his life, and adores you accordingly."

"Not now. I knew he had been through the phase, Opdyke. In fact, I had rather counted on its lasting; but it hasn't."

"From which I infer that he showed his teeth, to-day. What was the matter? Did you try to stroke his head, and accidentally hit him on the raw?"

"Not consciously. It's only that I've lost all my helpful grip on him."

"How do you know?"

"Because—to carry out your sheep-dog metaphor which, in reality, doesn't fit the case at all, Opdyke—he put his paw in mine, and then growled at me when I shook it."

"I'm not so much surprised. Brenton has been on his nerves lately. I can't just see why, though."

"Has he talked to you, Opdyke?"

"Good Lord, yes! A man on his nerves is bound to talk to something, whether it's a responsible person like yourself, or a mere bedpost like me. It's the talking that's the main thing, the sense of exhilaration that comes with the discussion of depressing personalities. We're all alike, every man of us, Whittenden. Didn't I take my turn, last night?"

"That's different."

"Not a bit. Spine or conscience, it's all one, once it begins to raise a ruction. But about Brenton: how do you diagnose his disease?"

Whittenden's reply came on the instant.

"Trying to believe too many things too hard."

"Hm!" Opdyke appeared to be considering. "Well, I think perhaps you've hit it. However, there are some extenuating circumstances. Give a man a dozen years or so of the mental starvation of a New England wilderness, and then all at once fill him chock full of new ideas, and he gets a pain within him, just as painful a pain as if it were in his tummy, not his mind. In time, it leads to chronic indigestion. That's what Brenton's got."

"Yes; but that is cause, not extenuating circumstance," Whittenden objected.

"It's extenuating, just the same. And then the wife! She is—"

"Well?"

"A pill," Reed said briefly.

"What sort?"

"Born common and dense. Grown self-centred and conceited. Lately turned from ultra-ritualistic to incipient Eddyism."

"That's bad."

"Isn't it? No wonder Brenton's down and out, for the time being. The question is how we are to prevent its becoming chronic. Of course, this is the bare outline; you can fill in the details out of your own experience."

"Praise heaven, I haven't any!" Whittenden responded piously.

"So much the better for you, and so very much the worse for Brenton. I had counted on your being here to haul him out of his present mental Turkish bath, and hang him out on the line in the fresh air and sun. I can't." Reed made an expressive grimace at the couch. "Besides, I'm a little bit like old Knut on the seashore; my own toes are getting very wet. The worst of that matter is that Brenton knows it."

Whittenden spoke tranquilly, his eyes on Opdyke's face, sure that he could rely upon the sense of humour in his friend.

"Yes, Brenton does know it. Do you realize, Opdyke, that you're the fellow who heated up his Turkish bath, in the first place?"

"What!" The word exploded with a violence that brought Ramsdell's head in at the open doorway.

"Yes, you."

Opdyke smiled at Ramsdell, in token of dismissal. Then,—

"Not guilty!" he protested.

"Yes, you are. I wormed it out of Brenton, in the end, in spite of his growling. It's too bad of me to tell you; and yet it seems only fair that you should get at the truth of the situation. Besides—You know you are a fearful egoist, Reed; we all are, for that matter. Besides, it may make you a little bit more tolerant of Brenton, may lead you to smooth him down where I have been rubbing him the wrong way. In fact, you owe it to him, to atone for the volcanic effect you have had on his theology."

"Dear man, I haven't upset his blamed theology," Reed objected. "I'm sound enough; I wouldn't upset a mouse. Ask Ramsdell if I've ever argued against his belief in the literal greening apple, 'a wee bit hunripe, sir,' upon which Adam feasted."

"Not in words. It's the fact of you that's so upsetting."

"I've been accused unjustly of a good many things in my time, Whittenden. Besides," again there came the grimace at the couch; "it rather seems to me that I'm the one who has been upset."

"That's the whole row. You are the first brick in the line. You bowled over Brenton; now he appears to be bowling over his wife. Yes, I mean it. If Brenton had held steady, she never would have wobbled, much less bolted off to Christian Science. She was keen enough to feel him tottering, and she evidently made up her mind to save herself from the impending ruins by taking refuge upon the other side of the street. I must say it was rather prudent of her. She had the sense to choose a new house built on a totally different stratum from her old one. If one collapsed, it couldn't well jar the other."

"Hold on, Whittenden!" Reed broke in, after long waiting for a pause. "I am willing to take my share of blame for most things; but I'll be—"

"Sh-h!" Whittenden warned him indolently. "Remember I'm a rector in good standing."

"Then bring me a book of synonyms. Anyhow, I'll be it, before I'll take the responsibility of that Brenton woman's vagaries. Ask Olive."

"I don't need to," Whittenden remarked at his cigar. "I married them. Likewise, I have seen Brenton, this very day. After collating those two references, I don't need Miss Keltridge for a commentary. As for Brenton—"

Opdyke interrupted.

"How do you figure out that I've been upsetting him?" he queried.

Whittenden settled himself in his favourite position, low in his chair and with one hand flung upward to grasp the chair-top above his head. His eyes, fixed on Opdyke, were full of merriment.

"Let's go back a little. When you first knew Brenton, he was a bit uncommon, the ordinary product of Calvinism flavoured with something vastly more hectic. That was inside him, that hectic splash in his blood; it made him imaginative, greedy of new ideas, greedy to prove that they were good. Moreover, he had been trained to believe that an irate Deity of unstable nerves presided over the universe; that He had created the world and beast and man in a series of experiments which had come off well, until it reached the last one, man; that man had gone bad in the making, and must be pursued and thrashed for all eternity on that account, unless he made an umbrella out of his acknowledged vices, and sat down underneath it and sang hymns to a harp accompaniment. Else, he was grilled eternally. But the gist of the whole matter was that man had gone bad in the making, and that his Maker was angry at him to the end of time. And that same blundering and angry Maker was the God one had to love and honour. Naturally, being constituted as he is, Brenton, once he had cut his wisdom teeth, turned balky, refused to see why he should love a God who behaved like a bad-tempered child that spites the toy he has broken and beats the wall where he has bumped his head. Meanwhile—"

"Do I—" Opdyke was beginning.

Whittenden waved aside the interruption.

"No; you don't come in yet. Be patient. As I was going to say, meanwhile he went into his first laboratory and made the prompt discovery that nothing ever happens, that causes are set in motion ages and ages before they ever materialize into effects. That set him to thinking, set him to wondering why the thing that he was trained to call revealed religion should be the only lawless thing in all the universe. Why the same Deity should have created law, and then set Himself up in opposition to it, should have started the wheels to running, and then, every now and then, stuck a mighty finger in, to pry them apart and make them slip a cog, in deference to some later modification of His original plan. It was just about then that I found him. He was floundering in a perfect mire, composed of the dust of conflict mingled with penitential tears. Really, he was knee-deep in the muck; and I put in a good share of my vacation in trying to haul him back to solid ground."

Opdyke nodded.

"He has told me."

"His side, only. Mine was a degree less serious, Reed. Sorry for him as I was, I couldn't help a certain amusement at seeing him get himself into such a mess over nothing. How any person with a fair share of common sense can—Well, I toiled over him, all summer. Talk about mines! I mined in him. I sank new shafts and I dug out new veins, and I presented samples of ore for his inspection. By the end of the summer, I'd got him to where he admitted that a law-abiding God was an improvement on his old, erratic, lawless, irate Deity; that it was treating Him with a long way more respect to endow Him with the attributes of a high-minded gentleman than to consider Him a mere purveyor of red-hot discipline for sins He had specifically created. Then, in the end, I put it squarely up to him: if he must preach at all, why not choose a church that stood for law and order in the universe, a church that, hanging to the old traditions, yet held out her arms to the new interpretations of the law and gospel, instead of sticking to the cast-iron, white-hot Calvinism which hadn't marched an inch, hadn't so much as changed the focus of its spectacles, since the pre-Darwin days of the very first of his ancestral parsons."

"Well?"

"Well." And Whittenden pulled himself up short. "This is where you begin to come in on the scene, you reprobate. I had just got him on his legs, marching sanely along, to the tune of 'All Thy works shall praise Thy name,' when the doctors came lugging you home into his very parish, laid you down underneath his very nose. No wonder you upset him, completely bowled him over off his theological pins. His God was just and loving and logical, even if a little bit more given to personal interference than any but a Calvinistic God is supposed to be. And here were you, from all accounts a law-abiding citizen—of course the theologian in him failed to take the black powder into account—smitten down in your prime by what he was electing to call the hand of Divine Providence. Of course, it tousled up all the notions I had been stroking down so carefully. He came on a knot—from his own story, I think it was the question as to why a purely innocent Opdyke was chosen as an object of wrathful vengeance. Then he immediately went panicky. That's the erratic strain in him. Up to a certain point, he's logical; then he gets into a seething mass of mismatched syllogisms. In this case, if Providence was good, and you also were good, then Providence wouldn't have knocked you into a cocked hat. No matter now about the sympathy of my phrase; I want you to get the gist of the whole situation. Well, he turned and twisted that around into form AAA, EAE, and so on down the line; and, worse luck, he twisted himself with it till he lost all his point of view, got dizzy, and missed his footing utterly. The original trouble lay in his sheer inability to tally up you and a benign Providence into any proper sort of a sum. Therefore, one of you must be improper and, hence, must be abolished. Therefore, as you were very weighty and manifestly refused to budge, he proceeded to abolish Providence."

"Hm. Well." Opdyke spoke thoughtfully. "I begin to see. However, even if I am to blame, I still insist upon it I'm not guilty. Meanwhile, what now?"

"Meanwhile, he's become so enamoured of the abolishing process that he's keeping on. Unless we can contrive to break up the habit, in the end he will analyze himself into his original elements, and then abolish those."

Reed laughed. Then he said slowly,—

"Poor beggar!"

"Yes," Whittenden assented, with sudden gravity; "that is just it. Poor beggar! And now, the worst of it all is that, unless we break it up at once, it will have to run its course, like any other disease."

"You call it a disease?"

"In his case, I do. Brenton isn't after any working truth to help along the rest of us; he's started hunting the ignis fatuus of abstract verity, provable to its utmost limit. Taken as mental gymnastics, it is doubtless a fine exercise. Taken as a spiritual tonic to a lot of world-tired fellow mortals, I confess I doubt its inherent value."

"You told him so?"

"In all honour, as an older man inside the same profession, I couldn't do much else."

"And he?"

"Resented it, exactly as you or I would have resented it, if we had happened to be standing in his spiritual shoes. I couldn't blame him, Reed; and yet I'm sorry."

Reed nodded.

"I know. Those things always take it out of one. Besides, it's hard lines to help in upsetting your own pedestal. I'm sorry that Brenton took it badly, Whittenden. I didn't think it of him; you have counted so much to him, for years."

Whittenden spoke a little sadly.

"He thinks that he has outgrown me, Reed; therefore he won't feel the hurt of it, one half so much."

Opdyke looked up sharply, a world of comprehension in his brave brown eyes.

"But it has hurt you, Whittenden."

"Yes," his companion confessed. "It has. It has hit me hard on my besetting sin, Reed, the liking to know that I'm of use to people. And I was of use to Brenton; I'd hoped to keep the old relation to the end; but it's impossible. I found that out, to-day."

"It depends on what you call being of use," Opdyke retorted. "You may not have coddled up his Ego, and patacaked his nerves; but there's sometimes a long way more helpfulness in a good thrashing than in all the coddlings since the world began. And Brenton has had an infernal amount of coddling lately; there's no denying that. It's not alone the women; it is sensible men like Doctor Keltridge and my father, men who ought to be filing his teeth, not softening them up with goodies. However, that's as it is. What will be the end of it, do you think?"

"Smash; unless you hold him, Reed."

"Me? I?"

"Yes, you. I don't mean—I'm in earnest now; I hate to see a good man chucking a good profession, and, unless he steadies down, he is bound to chuck it—I don't mean any nonsense about your owing it to him. I mean that you can hold him steady longer than anybody else."

"Not you?" Opdyke's accent was incredulous.

"My grip on him is gone. In the past, I may have helped him. All I could say, this afternoon, only rubbed him the wrong way, and increased the notion that he's cherishing, the notion that he's an uncomprehended genius. In heaven's name, Reed," and Whittenden's fist came crashing down on the arm of his chair; "is anything in this whole world more hard to fight than that same pose of being misunderstood? Nine times out of ten, it is mere pose. The tenth time, it is mere paranoia, and hence more manageable. No. My hold on Brenton is all gone. As I say, he has outgrown me; I still believe in my immortal soul, and a few such other trifles that no laboratory can prove. To be sure, you believe them, too; but, if you're going to manage Brenton, keep the beliefs tucked out of sight."

"Where's my hold on him, then?" Reed queried.

Whittenden, bending forward, laid his hand across the rug.

"This," he said quietly; and, strange to say, the words brought no sting to Reed Opdyke's mind.

Nevertheless, he objected to the fact.

"It seems so much like gallery play, Whittenden," he urged. "It's a bit nasty to be making capital out of a thing like that."

Whittenden shook his head, as, settling back again, he flung his hand up into the old resting place.

"Not if it's given you for just that purpose," he answered then. "No, Reed, hear me out. It never has been your way to dodge responsibilities; in the end, you're sure to buck up against this one, so you may as well take it now as ever. This thing appears to be your present asset. Properly managed, it can bring you no end of influence. Your friends, who really know you, will watch you hanging on to yourself like grim death; and, in time, they'll come to where they'll trust your grip to pull them out of danger, too, when they get to funking. It's an almighty hard job you've got ahead of you, and an endless one; still, knowing you, I know you will put it through and come out of it with your colours flying. Meanwhile," the clear eyes came back to focus; "hang on to Brenton."

"If I can."

"As long as you can, I mean. The time may come when, like myself, you'll have to let him go. In the mean time, though, he is worth the holding."

"Brenton is pure gold," Reed said quietly. "I have known him for many years."

But his companion shook his head.

"Gold, if you will; but not the purest. There is a dash of alloy we may as well admit, at the start. Else, it will only muddle things, later on. Brenton is good stuff, but a little weak. There's something in him that always will make him stumble and fall down just short of his ideals."

"Naturally, being human," Opdyke assented rather dryly. "For that matter, Whittenden, which one of us does not?"

But Whittenden made no answer. His hands clasped now at the back of his head, his eyes were resting thoughtfully upon the bright, brave face before him, a thinner face than it had been used to be, more hollow about the temples where the wavy hair clung closely; upon the swaddled figure which, only a year before, had tramped the Colorado mountains, lording it over many men. And now, to the burden of his own that Reed was bearing, he had added the responsibility of watching over Brenton, of guarding Brenton's weakness with his own great strength. Was it just and right to thrust this second burden on to Opdyke? However, self-forgetfulness comes best by focussing all one's energy upon the victim next in line; and Reed Opdyke, just at the present crisis, needed nothing else one half so much as self-forgetfulness. Nevertheless, the pity of it all, the seeming heartlessness, surged in on Whittenden. It would have been far easier for him to have tried to lighten Opdyke's burden than to increase its heaviness. But ease was not the main thing, after all.

Suddenly he flung himself forward in his chair, and put his two hands down upon the straight, lean shoulders underneath the rug.

"Reed," he said, with an abruptness he did not often show to any one; "if one man ever loved another, it's I with you. For God's sake, then, don't let the time ever come between us when I must stop being of some little use to you, as I've just had to do in the case of Brenton."

But, even while he spoke, he knew there was no need for Opdyke's prompt reply,—

"I fancy it never would come to that between the two of us. We've faced too many bad half-hours together. If only I could—"

Whittenden understood. He rose, thrust his hands into his pockets, turned away and tramped across the room.

"You always have, old man; now more than ever. And, every now and then, we parsons need it, need to be plucked out of our studies and set down face to face with life. It's because I'm owing you so much that I'd like to square up the account a little. Reed, I'm glad you sent for me, no matter if the reason was an ugly one."

And then, quite of his own initiative, he went away in search of Ramsdell. All at once there had swept over him the memory of their talk, the night before, and the memory overwhelmed him with its tragedy.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

"Yes, he sent for me, about nine o'clock." Doctor Keltridge, sitting in the window seat beside Opdyke, swung his heels like a boy, in gleeful recollection. "Of course, it was sotto voce, as it were, for he's the king pin of the Christian Science row, and it never would do to let it get about. When I got there, I found him all doubled up with asthma, wheezing like a grampus. 'Damn it, man,' he said, as soon as he caught a glimpse of me; 'I've been praying since six o'clock, and I'm getting worse, every minute! Give me something, quick, or I shall die.'"

And then the doctor went off into a roar of laughter over this latest victory of medicine.

"He came out all right?"

"Of course. People don't die of asthma; at least, not in his stage. They only get beastly uncomfortable. I had him asleep, within an hour."

"Yes, and next time?" Opdyke inquired.

"He'll go through the same rigmarole again. I suppose, when the fit comes on, he will telephone to headquarters for some sort of absent treatment. What charms me is the way those fellows seem to turn on the same tap, whatever the disease. A child down in Oak Street fell into boiling water, only just the other day. The neighbours heard him shrieking, and finally they telephoned to me. When I went into the house, the poor little sinner was writhing all over the bed and howling with the pain. Beside the bed, knitting a purple tippet, sat a healer, giving treatment, while she worked."

"Fact?"

"I can produce affidavits," Doctor Keltridge answered grimly. "What's more, I am going to do it soon. They can make fools of themselves, if they choose—only the dear Lord got ahead of them, and did it first; but, while I live to fight, they shall not butcher their little babies."

Reed nodded his approval. Then,—

"What did you do in this case?" he inquired, with more than a show of interest.

"Called in a policeman to see fair play. As it happened, he had a child of his own, so he fell to work in earnest. We turned out the woman, packed off the family into the next room, and went to work with oil and cotton. I'm afraid it was too late to do much good. If it was, though, I'll promise you I'll make Rome howl."

"Can you?" Reed asked practically.

"At least, I can try. As I say, I'm fond of babies; they have so much potential humanity bottled up inside of them. I will not have them slaughtered, if I can help it." Then, to all seeming, he digressed sharply. "By the way, Reed, have you seen the Brenton baby? No; of course you haven't. It's five months, now, ugly as sin, and the brightest little youngster you ever set your eyes on."

Opdyke stirred himself to a show of interest that was far from genuine. He never had felt himself especially drawn to babies; they seemed to him mussy and invertebrate. In fact, he realized with disconcerting suddenness, they shared some of his own least lovely attributes. However, whether the subject interested him or not, he would keep it up as long as he could, for the simple sake of lengthening out the doctor's visit. Therefore he said,—

"Brenton is immensely pleased with it."

"Well he may be. The baby is a charming little beggar, full of ingratiating tricks, and anybody knows Brenton needs everything of that kind he can get." Then swiftly the doctor brought his digression to a focus. "Well, that's just a case in point," he said triumphantly.

Opdyke laughed.

"Really, doctor, I'm afraid I don't quite follow," he said.

"Your fault, boy. You've not been paying proper attention to me; you were off on a sidetrack of your own laying. I was talking about the Brenton baby and its chances to get fair play, especially when it comes to teeth."

Light dawned on Opdyke.

"Oh, I see. You mean Mrs. Brenton may take a hand?"

"Morally sure. It's her child, too, worse luck! There is no legal help for the bad matter—yet. She will insist upon it that sin has a claim upon the child, and advise it to hoist itself above the sin."

"Is she such a—"

The doctor interrupted, less out of charity for Mrs. Brenton than from his own impatient testiness.

"Wait and see, boy. Wait and see. It is quite evident that she's a gone case, that nothing can save her. Sometimes, I even shudder for her husband."

"Brenton? He's immune."

"There's never any telling. She and her friends probably have been at work with pick and shovel, for months, trying to undermine his foundations. They are an insidious crew, Reed, totally insidious. If a man is the least bit nervous, their absent-treatment methods get in their work with a fatal effect sometimes. I've been watching them for years. They mine and countermine, until it isn't safe to predict who is immune and who isn't. For all either of us know, you may be doomed to be the next victim. If you are, though, send for me. I'll cure you of it, if it takes a dose of lysol. Well, good bye, boy. I'll drop in again, within a day or so."

The doctor went his way, flinging back a trail of chaff as long as his voice could carry to the room above, a room curiously dim and still, it seemed to him, as he came out into the strident sunshine of the July day. Once in the street, moreover, and safely out of range of Opdyke's windows, his fun dropped from him, and he shook his sturdy shoulders, as if he were trying to shake them free from an ugly, yet invisible, burden.

"There's a change there," he muttered to himself; "and I'll be hanged if I can analyze it. It's a curious sort of settling down of the boy's whole nature, as if he had thrown off some maddening strain or other, as if he were getting some new sort of grip upon himself. I wonder what it is. He's not better, nor worse; it can't be his health, then. Bodily, he is just about holding his own; nervously, he is steadying. I believe I'll talk it up with Olive; he may have given her a clue."

Olive, however, questioned, had no ideas upon the subject. She too had noticed the change, had felt it, rather; it was too slight really to be noticed. She had wondered at it. It was as if Opdyke were slowly tightening all his contacts with what of life there still was left to him, determining to make the best of a bad matter, and to extract all the enjoyment he was able out of his narrowing surroundings.

Reason about the cause of this as Olive would, she could not fathom it. Was Opdyke merely sickening of the individual members of his scanty calling list, and seeking to increase its variety? Or was he slowly gathering up some of the broken ties, ready for the day when once more he should leave his prison and walk out among them, a free man? Of two things, though, Olive was assured. The change had started a good two months earlier, had dated, as nearly as she could reckon backwards, from the time of Whittenden's brief visit. And the change, whatever else its alterations in the life of Opdyke, had made not one grain of difference with their friendship. Indeed, it seemed to Olive now and then that Opdyke turned to her society the more eagerly after a protracted season of receiving varied calls. However, well he might turn to Olive! It was fifteen months, now, since his accident, fifteen months that the brace of New York surgeons had professed their inability to predict a future. Uncertainty like that is bound to tell on any man; and, throughout it all, Olive Keltridge never once had failed him.

That Opdyke was renewing, after his limited fashion, many of his old associations was a fact evident to the whole town. The knowledge that he was lowering his year-long barricade, as a matter of course, brought to his door a horde of visitors bound to be more or less unwelcome. As a matter of fact, on one pretext or another, nine tenths of them were turned away. Ramsdell saw to that. Despite his misplaced aspirates, he possessed a perfect genius for uttering gracious fibs with a totally impenetrable smile of deprecation. Moreover, he knew from long experience Reed's choice in people, and he read strangers keenly. Therefore more than one potential visitor, moved by a combination of curiosity and benevolence, was assured that "Mr. Hopdyke 'as 'ad a very bad night, and is just gone off to sleep," although Dolph Dennison's coat tails or Olive Keltridge's linen skirt might have been vanishing through the doorway as the less welcome guest came in at the front gate. In spite of the moral certainties of the later guest, it was impossible to prove that Ramsdell was lying flagrantly. One could only smile, and hand in a card, with the agreeable surety that it would be referred to the upstairs potentate and pigeonholed in Ramsdell's retentive memory as ticket for admission later on, or else a permanent rejection label, past all argument or gainsaying.

Prather, the novelist, was one of the first names on the lengthening list of those who were to be admitted at all sorts of hours. Reed Opdyke accepted him in mirthful gratitude to the Providence which had arranged so equable a quid pro quo. Prather was manifestly out for copy, despite his constant disavowals of what he termed an envious slander hatched by Philistine minds. Reed Opdyke's sense of humour was still sufficiently acute to assure him that there was every possibility that, at some more or less remote period, he would find a full-length portrait of himself in Prather's pages, a portrait all the more easily recognizable by reason of the disguises which would draw attention to the essential human fact hidden behind their veils. On the other hand, however, Prather himself was offering to Reed no small amusement. To a man used to the wide spaces of the mountain landscapes, to the vast secrets hidden within the bowels of the mines, it seemed little short of the incredible that any human being at all worthy of the name could be so infinitely fussy over trifles, could wear himself to shreds over framing a bit of repartee, could spend a tortured morning, reducing to the limits of a rhythmic paragraph the illimitable glories of the earth and sky. And the ways by which he sought to carry out his achievement! These baffled any comprehension born of Opdyke's brain.

The day after the doctor's expressed anxiety as concerned the Brenton baby, Prather, coming to call, was more than ordinarily specific.

"My dear fellow, I am tired to death," he said, as he sat down at Opdyke's side, hitched up his trousers to prevent unseemly bagging and smoothed his coat into position.

"Working?" Reed queried.

"Like a dog. At least, that's the accepted phrase. The fact is, my terrier snored aloud, all the time I was about it. No. I assure you, I didn't read my stuff to him, as I went on." And Prather paused to laugh merrily at his own humour. Indeed, it was his own appreciation of his humour which led him to his frequent calls on Reed, for the little man was generous at heart, and loath to waste a really clever thing, when it might be doing untold good. "But still," he went on; "it shows the fallacy of the phrase. I work like a dog, and the real dog slumbers. Good joke, that! But, for a fact, I have been working."

"Another novel?"

"Yes. I tell the publishers it must be my swan song. Really, I am getting an old man. But they refuse to see it; I expect they will keep me in harness till I am—in my dotage," he added, with a reckless disregard of any possible comment which the phrase might call up in Opdyke's mind.

Opdyke was proof against temptation. Instead,—

"How are you getting on?" he asked.

"Very well; very well indeed, considering my breakfast," Prather responded unexpectedly. "I have done seventeen hundred words, to-day."

"Really?" Opdyke's accent concealed the fact that he had no idea whether the record was great or small. Then he yielded to his curiosity. "But what has your breakfast to do about it, Prather?"

The little novelist settled himself more deeply in his chair, and caressed his small mustache with two small hands which totally failed to conceal the smile behind them.

"I was hoping you would ask the question, my dear fellow. It's a new idea of mine, and, really, I am not at all ashamed of it. Clever, I call it, do you know," he added, with rising enthusiasm. "In the old days, when I was a callow beginner, I used to eat at random. Deuce knows the messes it kicked up, too, with my plots! Now I know better. I fit my meals, my breakfast above all, to the kind of chapter I have ahead of me. When I need to be analytic, I eat beans and certain cereals, and drink black coffee very hot and very fast. Before a love scene, I eat curried things or else put on the stronger kinds of sauces. For the final parting of the lovers, I even have used both. And then for tragedy, for utter grief, I take to cold things, cold things rather underdone, if possible. My wife is a great help to me, in all this planning. She admires my work tremendously; most women do, and she has helped me work the theories out." Suddenly he brought himself up with a round turn that left him facing Opdyke. "Opdyke," he said abruptly; "you ought to have a wife."

"But I don't write any novels," Reed protested, a trifle blank at the swift attack.

"No; but you may. You've had experiences, and you've any amount of time," Prather argued kindly. "I'd help you get a start, you know. And then, besides, you would find it so very comforting."

"The novel?"

"No; the wife. She could take Ramsdell's place, you know."

Reed chuckled.

"She would need to be a lusty Amazon, Prather, if she took the contract of lugging me about."

But Prather waved his hand in circles that were intended to be explanatory.

"Not a bit, Opdyke; not a bit," he said, with effervescent cheer. "It would take you a little while to get her, don't you know; and, by that time, you'd be up and about, really almost as well as ever. And there are things, you know, things about your buttons and your meals, that nobody but a wife can ever manage properly. Take my advice, Opdyke, the advice of a veteran, and go about it. Then, when you're on your feet again, you'll have her ready to look out for you."

Reed smiled rather inscrutably to himself.

"Plenty of time, Prather," he said.

"No, no." Prather rose. "Best be about it soon. You'll find it makes the greatest difference with you. Besides, as I say, it is time you went about it, or you will get on your legs, the same lonely bachelor you were when you went off them. And Doctor Keltridge says that you are gaining fast."

Reed looked up suddenly, incisively.

"Did Doctor Keltridge say that?" he demanded.

"Well, not in those exact words; but that was the burden of his song, the motif of his story, if I may speak so shoppishly." Again Prather's hand sought his mustache. "It is quite evident to everybody, Opdyke, that you are on the gain."

Reed Opdyke watched him out of sight. Then,—

"Is it?" he said a little bitterly. "I wonder why his everybody must needs exclude me."

Next day, Olive gone and no one else in prospect, Reed lay staring out through the open window into the green trees on the lawn, staring listlessly, with no especial thought of envy for the birds hopping among the branches. Indeed, even to Reed himself, that was the most tragic phase of the whole tragic situation: that his hours of restless longing seemed to have come to a final end. Always too sane to waste regrets upon futilities, he had come now to a point of passive acceptance of the immutable bad in his surroundings, an active effort only to snatch at whatever good remained. It did not affect his attitude in the very least that, nine days out of every ten, he had to take a spiritual microscope to hunt the good. One of the longest lessons is the learning to pick up the crumbs of comfort, when one has been used to munching the whole loaf. However, Reed was conning the lesson steadily, learning it by slow degrees.

This time, however, he was more occupied in studying how best to face certain inevitable bad half-hours before him than he was in picking any crumbs of comfort from their prospect. It seemed to him a little bit unfair, now that he knew past all gainsaying what the future held for him, to go on allowing his parents and some friends—well, Olive, if one must be so specific—to continue hoping against hope that he would ever be well, and on his legs, and walking. Out of his own experience, Opdyke knew that it is uncertainty which kills. Had he any right to go on in silence, and not end the suspense once and for all? Of course, it was the place of the surgeons to utter the decree of condemnation. However, as long as they were not sufficiently astute to find out the truth of the prospect, then, in all honour, was it not up to him?

There was no longer any hope of his recovery; that he knew of a surety, knew as, every now and then, one does know things unprovable. He had taken the knowledge pluckily, albeit it had told on him more than he would have been willing to confess. It would have told on him still more, though, had it not been for his week with Whittenden. All that week, he had clung to Whittenden, as the drowning man clings to the life raft. In the end, Whittenden had dragged him to the shore. And now it was his own turn to do as much for his parents, and for Olive. Yes, for Olive. Poor Olive! Yes, she was bound to take it hard.

So lost in thought of Olive was he that he started violently, when he heard coming up the stairway to him the unmistakable rustle of feminine skirts. He forgot the tree tops instantly, forgot his questionings. Olive was coming back again. Doubtless, after her frequent custom, she was returning to tell him something that she had forgotten. He turned his head expectantly. Olive would have been welcome, a dozen times a day; she was the one person in the world who never antagonized him, never bored him, never tired him with irrelevant chatter. Now, without in the least realizing the fact, he was shaping his lips into a smile of eager welcome. Only an instant later, the smile had vanished, and there had come into his brave brown eyes a look astonishingly like consternation.

Not Olive, but Katharine Brenton, stood upon his threshold; and, as Opdyke was too well aware, for the time being that threshold was totally unguarded.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

With a rustle born of plenteous starch, a quiver of nodding roses on her hat and an ultra-evident aroma of violet preceding her coming, Katharine swept across the floor and halted beside Opdyke's couch. Even in the first instant of keen resentment at her appearing, Opdyke was conscious of no small surprise at beholding her so well dressed. In his crass ignorance, he had yet to learn that, in the minds of the elect, good clothes are an essential weapon in contesting the claims of sin-born disease. Indeed, he confessed to himself that, had Katharine only been a shade more self-distrustful, she would not have been a bad looking woman. It was very plain, however, that even the salary of the rector of Saint Peter's would not hold out long before the demands made upon it by the rector's lady's wardrobe. Moreover, it was a little bit surprising to find the country daisy expanded to the limits of a prize sunflower such as this.

"You must remember me, Mr. Opdyke," she was saying effusively. "Such an old, old acquaintance, you know! It must be at least seven or eight years, since I first knew you. I was only little Katharine Harrison then; I remember perfectly how shy and gauche I was, and how terrified at you. Shall I sit here? Thank you. And you were very nice to me. I often tell Scott how much it meant to me. Really, it was my first introduction to the big, big world."

Opdyke rallied swiftly to this unlooked-for demand upon his social instincts.

"No one ever would have suspected it from seeing you, Mrs. Brenton," he assured her, with manful falsity.

She crackled her starch at him, with a buoyant pleasure in his words.

"You have all your old ingratiating tricks of speech," she told him. "Really, nowadays, you ought to be steadying down a little, Mr. Opdyke."

"And thinking on my latter end?" he queried, although he flushed a little at her words. "It's not profitable to meditate upon a blank monotony, you know."

Swiftly she bent forward, resting her elbow on her white linen knee, her chin on her white silk palm.

"But why let it be monotonous?" she demanded.

Reed made a wry face, ostensibly at his own situation, actually at the brutally frank question from what was, in fact, a total stranger.

"I really don't see how I well can help it, Mrs. Brenton," he said quietly.

Lifting her chin from her palm, she clasped her gloves in her lap, and looked down at her host with manifest encouragement.

"Only by lifting yourself above it, Mr. Opdyke," she enlightened him.

Reed smiled grimly.

"I'm very heavy; it would take too large a derrick," he replied. "How is Brenton, to-day?"

"Quite as usual, thank you. Of course, we both are so busy that I see comparatively little of him," Katharine said serenely.

Reed caught at the digression.

"Of course. I suppose the youngster keeps you very busy, Mrs. Brenton."

"Oh, it isn't the baby. I have a wonderful nurse for him, some one Doctor Keltridge recommended."

Again Reed caught at the chance for a digression.

"Doctor Keltridge is a wonderful man," he remarked, a little bit maliciously.

Too late, he realized his blunder, for without delay, Katharine seized the opportunity to snap back to her former position.

"Yes, after his fashion. It is only rather sad to see so broad an intellect buried under the masses of old-time tradition. He gives a strychnine tonic when we others would merely pour ourselves into the gap, and fight disease with mind."

Opdyke's brown eyes became inscrutable.

"But do you think that mind can do the business, Mrs. Brenton?" he inquired.

"Yes, if we apply it in all earnestness. Of course, one must first believe; then the rest of it is easy."

"But," Opdyke's eyes were still inscrutable, although his accent was that of the eager student; "do you think that one's mind always matches up to the size of the disease? I should suppose that, just now and then, they might not fit."

"Dear Mr. Opdyke, there is always the Universal Mind on whom we are allowed to call, in time of need," Katharine assured him, with an unction that made Opdyke long to pitch her, head first, starch and all, through the open window just behind her. No wonder Brenton looked about all in, if this was the sort of domestic table talk dished up for him!

There was a short pause, broken only by the faint crackling of starchy petticoats. Then Katharine unclasped her hands, straightened her hat, and clasped her hands anew, this time slightly above the region of the belt.

"Mr. Opdyke," she said gravely then; "something within me, here, urges me to give you the message."

"The—?" Reed inquired politely.

"The message of our faith. When I came in, it was my only idea to drop in on you and cheer you up a bit; but now—"

During her impressive pause, Opdyke reflected that it was plain the woman was lying flagrantly, that she had come to see him with fell purpose. He loathed that purpose absolutely; he resented it most keenly. None the less, the one course open to him was to submit as little ungraciously as he was able. No moral force would be able to dislodge his guest; and Ramsdell could not well be summoned, to pluck forth the rector's lady and escort her, willy-nilly, to the outer door.

But Katharine's pause had ended.

"But now I feel that it would be wrong for me to neglect the chance to sow my little seed in the soil so plainly harrowed for its growth. Mr. Opdyke," and now the roses trembled with her earnestness; "do you realize at all the meaning of the word disease?"

Reed yielded to a wayward impulse left over from his boyhood.

"It generally is supposed to be connected rather intimately with germs, Mrs. Brenton," he assured her.

"By no means. And so you really do cling to the old, old fallacies? It seems too bad, and for such a man as you are. Most of us, you know, have cast them over. We now are quite convinced that disease is but another name for sin and unbelief; that the universal cure lies in the submission of one's will to the dictates of the Universal Mind."

"Really? How interesting!" Opdyke's courteous voice lacked none of the symptoms of complete conviction.

Katharine leaned a little nearer.

"Mr. Opdyke, little as you may believe it, physical disease has no real existence."

"Indeed?" Reed queried politely, quite as if the question had no personal significance for him.

"Not at all. It only shows the inherent weakness of the one who believes himself an invalid."

This time, Reed felt himself suddenly turning balky.

"Oh, I say!" he protested.

Katharine laid a steadying hand upon the couch, and Opdyke eyed the steadying hand much as if it had been a toad.

"Mr. Opdyke, even in so sad a case as yours, the remedy is quite within your hands," she told him gravely.

Reed's sense of humour came back again to his relief.

"How do you make that out?" he asked her, taking his eyes from the potential hopping toad to rest them on the face before him, a face serenely smug with the consciousness of its own sanctification.

"If you would only trust and believe, would throw your whole nature into tune with spiritual law and order, you could get up off from that couch, tomorrow, and walk down to the post office and back again."

Reed lost the great essential fact, unhappily, in gloating over the finale. Why didn't the woman say the butcher shop, and done with it, since she was so set upon a rhetorical slump of some sort? However, he smothered his interest in the detail, and went back again to the central fact.

"It only rests with you how long you are to lie here, Mr. Opdyke," Katharine was reiterating solemnly, yet with the same carefully manufactured smile that had appeared upon her lips simultaneously with the first expressions of her creed.

Reed experienced a sudden wave of physical nausea, as he watched it.

"I wish that I could believe you, Mrs. Brenton," he said dryly. "Unfortunately, it is quite impossible."

Katharine did her best to make her smile more luminous.

"You think so, Mr. Opdyke? So long as you will not believe, you will not throw off your weakness of the body. You must face disease, not yield to it. You must lift yourself above it, must plant your feet upon it in firm disdain, and, using it as a footstool, arise from its ugly foundations to a perfect and sinless state of health." Again she paused, and fixed her rapt gaze upon his face which slowly was reddening and stiffening into something closely akin to a blinding rage. "Mr. Opdyke, believe me: your poor, broken body is only the outer guise of your erring mind. Dismiss your error; throw yourself unresistingly into the vast and placid pool of the Cosmic Ego, and you will arise from your bed of pain, a cured and healthy man."

A little vein beside Reed's temple swelled slightly and began to throb. It seemed to him that this impossible woman was tearing his nerves apart in a remorseless effort to get at the inmost secrets of his consciousness. By all the laws of self-preservation, he had every right to drive her from the room. By all the laws of chivalrous courtesy, he must lie there, prostrate, at her mercy, and listen to her with an unflinching smile, until the wheels of her enthusiasm should run down—if, indeed, they ever did.

"I am afraid, Mrs. Brenton," he was beginning as suavely as he was able.

Katharine, however, interrupted him.

"Mr. Opdyke," she demanded, with a sort of religious sternness; "have you ever faced disease?"

"I was under the impression that I had," he answered curtly.

"Looked it steadily between the eyes, I mean; sought to impress it with your mental dominance? Disease is a coward, we are told, a coward who leaves us, when it knows we feel no fear of it. If you just once would assert your manliness, not lie there, supine, and—"

"Mr. Hopdyke," Ramsdell's voice said from the threshold; "Doctor Keltridge is downstairs, and is very anxious to see you about something most important. What shall I tell 'im?"

Reed, his temples throbbing now in good earnest, smothered a Thank God, and turned to smile at Ramsdell. Ramsdell met the smile with impenetrable gravity. None the less, a look in the tail of his eye set Opdyke wondering whether, indeed, the message from the doctor was quite the accident it seemed.

"Send him up, of course, Ramsdell. Doctor Keltridge is too busy a man to be kept waiting," he said briefly.

To his extreme surprise, Katharine took the hint and rose.

"And I must go, Mr. Opdyke. It has been such a pleasant time for me, this little talk with you. Some day, perhaps you will let me come again. Meanwhile, you really will be thinking over some of the things I've said?"

"Very likely," Reed answered rather shortly, as once more the hoptoad of a hand rested unpleasantly close to his shoulder. "It's not a thing one is likely to forget."

"I am so glad. How do you do, Doctor Keltridge?" she added archly. "You find me here, invading your province. I do hope you won't be too angry." And, with a nod to Reed, she rustled from the room.

It was plain, however, that the doctor was angry, very, very angry. With a gesture of complete disgust, he thrust aside the chair in which she had been sitting, drew up another and, seating himself, rested his long fingers on Opdyke's wrist, while his keen eyes searched the face, more flushed now than he had ever seen it, the veins about the temples filled to bursting and pounding madly, the wavy hair above them clinging tightly to the brow. As long as the rustling skirts were audible, the doctor sat there, silent, his face blackening more with every second. When at last the front-door screen had clicked behind her, he spoke.

"Boy, I'd have given a thousand dollars to have prevented this. That damned woman has been enough to put you back a dozen months. Yes, yes. I know she is a fool; but I also know that your nerves aren't in any state to stand her infernal diatribes. Been telling you it rested with you alone to choose the psychological moment for going out to walk, with your bed strapped on your back? Yes; I know, I tell you. No use for you to deny. No sense, either, for that matter. You owe the woman nothing; and, by thunder," he let go the wrist and gently laid his hand on Opdyke's throbbing head; "she is going to owe you a good deal. If she had kept on much longer, you'd have been a case for a hypodermic, perhaps worse. How the devil did she get up here, Ramsdell?"

Ramsdell, from the foot of the couch, was watching Opdyke with the dumb, anxious entreaty of a faithful dog.

"Really, I couldn't 'elp it, sir. Mr. Hopdyke 'ad sent me of an errand. When I got back, why, 'ere she was, a-going it as bad as any suffragette." Ramsdell checked himself abruptly, and gave a discreet little cough. Then, warned by something in the doctor's face that he could proceed with perfect safety, he went on once more. "As I came hup the stairs, I 'eard 'er telling Mr. Hopdyke that he must harise and leave 'is disease be'ind 'im; and hit seemed to me, sir, I'd best telephone to you, for fear he'd be doing a thing so rash, and 'urt 'imself for ever. I trust," he now addressed himself to Opdyke; "trust there was no liberty taken, sir."

Reed laughed, despite the fact that the encounter with Mrs. Brenton's new theology had left him feeling most ignobly weak.

"So that was it? Ramsdell, you're a wily fox. I'll see you don't regret it. And don't worry. I'm all right, and I promise you I won't try any gymnastics till the doctor gives me leave." Then, Ramsdell gone, he turned to the doctor in a sudden wave of self-surrender which the older man found exceeding pitiful. "Doctor, am I a futile sort of chap, or am I slowly going off my head? The woman talked the most utter rubbish; I know it's total rot. And yet—Doctor," and the brown eyes looked up into the keen eyes above them with an appeal before which the keen eyes veiled themselves. "Doctor," Reed added a bit unsteadily; "I thought I had succeeded in getting a firm grip on myself once for all; and now—it's gone."

In the end, it was a case for hypodermics, that night, the first time for almost a year. The doctor stayed with Reed till time for dinner; then, with an absolute casualness, he invited Mrs. Opdyke to let him stay and dine with her and the professor. Downstairs, his talk was cheery, careless; no one, seeing the doctor for the first time, would have suspected that anything was on his mind. The professor, though, knew his old friend better, yet he forebore to put a question. He knew that, when Doctor Keltridge was quite ready, he was wont to speak; but not before.

Doctor Keltridge's cigar, smoked in Reed's room, lasted long, that night; above it, the doctor was silent, indolent, and yet alert to every change in the face before him. At nine o'clock, he rose, dived into his breast pocket and pulled out a little case. An instant later, he had bent above the couch.

"Now, Ramsdell," he said cheerily, when he had once more tucked the rug in about Opdyke's arm; "you'd better get this fellow into bed at once. If he isn't sound asleep, inside an hour, you'll know what to do. A good night to you, boy, and many thanks for your educated taste in tobacco. Whatever you do, never allow your supplies to run low, or you'll straightway lose a good half of your social pull. Good night." And, with a nod to Ramsdell, he was gone.

Opdyke was not asleep within an hour. Moreover, although Ramsdell did know what to do, and did it, the stroke of midnight found him still staring at the dark with burning eyes, while the pillowcase underneath his head hissed faintly to the steady throbbing of his temples. The noxious, deadly poison of Mrs. Brenton's talk had made its insidious way through and through his system, loosening its carefully maintained tensions, overthrowing its balances, stirring up all the old, forgotten dregs of rebellious restlessness and turning them into his blood. It mattered nothing that Reed Opdyke recognized the fact that it was poison, mattered nothing that he despised it and fought against it with every antidote within his reach. The harm was done; it would take long and long to undo it, to bring him back to his old mental health once more.

Across the darkness, his life seemed to him to be marching, pageant-wise, a series of separated scenes. They started, according to his idea, in the faint shaft of light that crept in to him through Ramsdell's keyhole—for, despite all orders, the faithful fellow had flatly refused to put himself into bed until Opdyke himself should be snoring. They started, each one of them, in the narrow thread of light; they marched slowly across the blackness of the ceiling above his head, and then they ranged themselves along the opposite wall, and lurked there in the shadow, leering at him. In each one of them, moreover, he held the very centre of the stage.

He saw himself a student, loitering about the elm-arched campus, lounging above a table in the smoke-thick air of Mory's, sitting in Professor Mansfield's study and gravely discussing with him the possibilities included in Scott Brenton. He saw himself in his professional school, star of his class, pampered godling of his mates. He saw himself, his fists in his pockets and his nose to the tanging breeze, striding along the Colorado mountain sides, saw himself, lightly poised on any sort of a contrivance that could swing from a rope's end, going down into the darkness of the mine. Then he saw himself—and, as he looked, his eyes were steady—scrambling over the heaps of wreckage towards the stark form beyond.

And then he saw himself the centre of a group of white-coated surgeons, with Ramsdell's face beside him, Ramsdell's curiously gentle arm around his shoulders. He saw himself, again with Ramsdell, this time at home, and with the stanch old doctor at his other side. And then, all at once, the other figures faded, and he saw himself alone with Olive; saw Olive, daintily alive and eager, saw her merry mask of teasing fun which never really covered the pitiful comprehension underneath; saw himself, still, helpless, a wretched compromise between death and life, answering her nonsense with laughing lips, but with eyes which, however brave, yet were full of an insistent appeal for something that she alone could give him. And Olive was not slow of understanding. Oh, God—

He flung his arm, the arm scarred with the fresh pricks of the useless hypodermic needle, across his burning eyes, his throbbing temples, before he finished out his phrase. Oh, God have mercy! What had he, albeit dumbly, allowed himself to ask of Olive? What right had he, henceforward, to call himself a man, or honourable, or brave, or anything else but an insufferably selfish cad, that he had ever once allowed one such instant of supine appeal to scar the surface of their perfect friendship? A girl like Olive was not for such a man as he was—now. Once, it might have been; but, at that time, it had not occurred to him to think about it. In the fulness of his powers, he had had scant time for women. Now, in his utter weakness—And Olive—

The thread of light became a sudden flood. His hot, wet eyes shrank from the dazzle.

"Did you speak, sir?" Ramsdell inquired, from the nearer threshold.

Some sudden instinct of weakness made Opdyke long for the touch of any firm and friendly hand.

"No, you old owl," he answered. "Still, now you are here, do you mind trying to straighten me out a little? Thanks. That's very good. Now go to bed. I think I am beginning to feel sleepy."

Ramsdell obediently vanished; and Opdyke, shutting his teeth upon his mental agonies, lay silent and as if turned to stone. With a supreme effort at self-control, he drove the pictures from the shadowy wall; he banished Olive from his mind. Instead, he forced himself to think of Whittenden, of the charge that Whittenden had laid on him concerning Brenton. It had seemed a bit unfair at the time; now, looking backward, Opdyke could see that, as usual, Whittenden had been wise. Responsibilities, such as that one, would be very steadying. The need of holding the next man fast would tighten his grip upon himself. After all, it was grip he needed; else, he would be a futile frazzle of humanity, like Prather.

With an inconsequential snap, poor Reed's brain was off again, and on a fresh and open stretch of road. Then suddenly it came against another obstacle. Only the very afternoon before, Prather had broken off his babble to advise a wife, as spiritual plaster for all of this world's woe. A wife! And for him! That any man in his position and with his outlook could harbour for an instant an idea so selfish! And even Olive—

However, this time, Ramsdell did not hear.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Doctor Keltridge smoked for a while in silence. Then,—

"Opdyke is hunting for a new assistant," he said.

Brenton, who had been sitting with his eyes fastened to the rug before him, looked up at the doctor. Looking, his gray eyes were heavy, their light temporarily extinct. Indeed, the old doctor, watching him intently from above his pipe, wondered a little if that light would ever come again. He was quite well aware that it burns only in eyes bent hopefully upon a remote, receding, yet conquerable ideal. Once extinguished, it is well-nigh impossible to kindle it again.

"What is that for?" Brenton queried, with the utter listlessness of a man whose sole absorption is in himself.

"A variety of reasons, I suspect. To be sure, he himself only declares one: the insistent professional calls on his time from outside: books, magazine articles, lectures, and all that. It is wonderfully good for the college to have a man of his calibre on its list. As a trustee, it is my notion that they'd much better give him anything he happens to want, for fear, if they refuse, he'll go out altogether."

"He wouldn't," Brenton said quickly.

"You never know, in a case like that of Opdyke. He has done grand work; his record here is made and done with. He has outside calls enough to fill up his time to the limit of his strength; he has enough money to carry him in comparative luxury to the end of all things, even if he never—"

"Professor Opdyke is no pot-boiler," Brenton interrupted. "It's not money that he counts; it's the thing itself he's after."

"What thing?" the doctor asked, with seeming carelessness.

Brenton flashed into sudden fire.

"The finishing out his work. The trying to add one little bit to the sum total of permanent knowledge. The kind of thing you do yourself, doctor, once your patients give you time to get away from the trail of their beastly aches and pains."

The doctor eyed his companion with a sort of grim amusement.

"That last phrase sounds suspicious, Brenton," he remarked. "Are you also—"

Brenton did not wait for him to finish out the question.

"No; I am not," he snapped, with a testiness that would have been a healthy mental symptom, had it not betrayed the fact that his nerves were dangerously on edge.

The doctor, still watching him from above his pipe, judged it would be well to change the subject.

"Besides," he added casually; "I fancy that Reed may be an entering factor."

"Reed?"

"Yes, with his father. The suspense is telling on them all, telling badly on the professor. From the point of view of the family physician, I believe it is any amount worse than accepting even a surety of the worst."

"What do you call the worst?" Brenton asked flatly.

"That Reed would have to lie there on his back, till the remotest end of time."

For an instant, the old light flared up in Brenton's eyes. Rising, with a backward thrust of his chair that sent it crashing against a table, he tramped the length of the room and back again.

"God help him!" he said, low. "You think that such a thing is possible?"

The doctor nodded curtly. He loved Reed as he would have loved a son of his own, and it hurt him to put into words even the possibility.

"It is in the limits of the possible," he answered.

Again the tramp across the floor and back again. Then Brenton burst out fiercely.

"And I can sit here and whimper about my fate, that I am the square peg in the round hole, while he—Doctor Keltridge, you don't mean it has come to that?"

"Not yet. I only said, what we all must know, that it is on the cards. No one can tell whether they will turn up, or down. Of course, the fact that the rallying comes so slowly is bound to make us fear that the injury was worse than we thought at first. On the other hand, it is almost out of the question to judge it with any accuracy. Do what we will, we can't get inside Reed's body, and see for ourselves just what reactions, if any, are going on in there. I wonder, Brenton," the doctor faced him steadily; "if ever it has occurred to you that, in the last analysis, pure science is often baffled by the personal equation which comes into it, which defies all analysis, and which upsets the whole of our calculations. If it were not for the fact that Reed's ego is his own property, not ours, we could have settled this point about his future, months on months ago. Beyond a certain limit, though, there is no way for us to tell how far he responds to our experimental treatment. If his muscles do twitch, well and good. If they almost twitch and don't, no mortal mind outside of his can reckon how wide the falling short has been. You can talk about pure, abstract, impersonal science, till the moon turns to an Edam cheese. You can no more grasp the initial fact of what that science really is, than you can follow the example of the athletic cow. There's always the distorting lens of one's own mind to be taken into consideration; quite often there's another fellow's: the eye-piece of the compound microscope, and the objective. Take them away, and what impression do you get?" The doctor pulled himself abruptly out of his harangue. "You can't get any science, without the muddling addition of an ego, Brenton; and, moreover, there's a tentacle or two of every ego that sticks out beyond the edges of the law, and demands a separate code for its own management. It is in framing that separate code that we all fall down."

But, to his regret, Brenton was deaf to his harangue.

"You think," he was repeating; "that it may end in that?"

The doctor ruffled his hair until it stood on end, rampant and tousled as a corn-husk mat.

"Good Lord, man! A doctor doesn't think things," he said, with sudden ire. "Moreover, if he did, he wouldn't say them out. Else, where would his patients be? You can frighten any man to death, by offering him a premature glimpse into the next decade. One day at a time is enough for most of us; more than some of us can manage. As for Reed, it is impossible to testify at present; in the end, I fancy, he will be the chief witness for the defence. Meanwhile, he's game. You don't find him maundering supinely about his latter end. No! Do sit down. That wasn't a back-hander, aimed at you, Brenton. I hit straight, or not at all. I wish I could give you a tonic that would take away a little of your blamed self-sensitiveness, if I can coin the term. You're as unselfish as the rest of them, until you get hold of a bit of impersonal slander. Then you seize it in your arms, and hold it on your mental stomach like a mustard plaster. It doesn't do any good, though. It hurts like thunder in the time of it, and it plays the deuce with your later digestion."

Obediently Brenton sat down; or, to speak more accurately, was borne down by the weight of the doctor's energetic denunciation. It was the first time that he had found the doctor in such a mood as that. Mercifully, Brenton had no inkling that he had brought it on himself by his prelude to the talk. It would have shocked him unspeakably, had it dawned upon him that Doctor Keltridge, within himself, was applying profane adjectives to the spiritual doubtings of his rector. It would have astounded him beyond all words, had he known how trivial to the doctor's seasoned mind had seemed his own juggling touch upon the rival claims of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Had Brenton held within himself one tenth of Reed Opdyke's staying power, all would have come out right in the end. The pieces of the puzzle would have fallen into their true places. Instead, Scott Brenton, in his impatience, was apparently determined to chop the pieces into smaller bits, and then to deface their surfaces almost past recognition. Therefore it had seemed to Doctor Keltridge the one way of escape from the whole pother had been opened by his words, which he now repeated with a fresh emphasis that he hoped would finally impress them upon Scott Brenton's ear.

"Yes; and so, with all this complication on his hands, the professor is hunting for a new assistant."

This time, Brenton looked at him keenly.

"Are you telling that fact to me, for any especial reason, doctor?" he demanded.

"Yes, to my shame, I am. By good rights, Brenton, I ought to order you into a sanatorium, until you get over the desire to make an idiot of yourself. I doubt, though, if it would do any good. I fancy that your case is chronic, that you won't be happy till you've muddled your intellectual salvation according to your own notions. If that's the fact, the sooner you go about it, the better. Your hanging on at Saint Peter's is only so much wear and tear upon your nerves. Ours, too, when it comes to that. One doesn't get much sanctification out of a sermon couched in glittering generalities and delivered by a rector with a crumpled brow. Therefore the trustee of the college has told tales to the doctor, and the doctor is hinting the gist of those tales to his patient."

"Do you think I'd fill the place?" Brenton's voice surprised himself by its unwonted quivering of eagerness.

"Depends on whether you get the chance," the doctor parried. "Moreover, your getting the chance depends on what you think about your taking it. There's another man talked about for the position; but I have a good deal of say in the matter, and Opdyke has more. He considers you rather a genius in his line, a wasted genius, and would jump at a chance to have you put in under him as instructor. What do you think?"

Brenton's reply came without an instant's hesitation.

"I will take it, if it's offered me."

"You know it will shut Saint Peter's door to you for ever? In a case like this, one can't go back again."

"I know," Brenton made brief assent.

"You realize all you are giving up?"

"I do."

"You know the world is full of potential Prathers; and you also know what your wife will say? Does she understand what you have been going through?"

Brenton's lips stiffened.

"I have not meant to keep anything back from her. How far she has grasped all it has meant to me—However, in honour, I have done my best."

And, despite the weakening drop of his voice on the final phrases, the doctor believed him. Believing and likewise knowing Katharine, he pitied Brenton from the bottom of his heart. After all, was the fellow quite so invertebrate as he had sometimes seemed?

"Well, I will talk to Opdyke first, and then bring the matter up before the rest of the trustees. There's a meeting, early in October. Best not do anything until that is over. Then, in all decency, you will have to give a little time to Saint Peter's. You can't well bolt off, like a cook in a tantrum. Prepare their Christmas diet for them; and then go into this other thing, directly after mid-years."

"But, feeling as I do, have I any right to keep on at Saint Peter's?" Brenton queried.

The doctor cut his query short.

"Business is business, no matter how you feel. That curate of yours is as futile as a Persian pussy in a ten-horse plough. It takes a little time to pick up the right sort of a new man for a church like this; you have no right to leave the whole plant at loose ends, while they are about it, just because your ego has a pain in its psychological digestion. People have got to go on being married and buried, even if you can't make a scientific assay of the doctrine of the Atonement. Well," the doctor rose and emptied out his long-cold pipe; "that's all. I wish you luck, Brenton, and I'll help you all I can. Whatever I think about your mental calibre, I do believe that you are honest; and, after all, that's the main thing we all are trying for. Now go along, and talk this matter over with your wife. By the way, how is the baby?"

"A little droopy still. It's not too easy to bring him out of it, as long as I can only give him your stuff on the sly, when Mrs. Brenton is out of the room." Brenton cast a hasty glance at his watch. "It's time he had it now. I must be going," he said hurriedly, and, an instant later, he had bolted from the room.

The doctor listened for the closing of the door. Then his face lost a little of its keenness, and he sighed.

"It must be the very devil and all to have a conscience," he remarked at the four walls around him. "Thank God for one thing: I'm immune."

Filling himself a fresh pipe, he sat himself down to its enjoyment. Half way through it, he spoke once more.

"That woman would beat the Devil in a game of poker, if she could get the immortal souls of men by way of chips."

But the only immortal soul in Katharine's hands just now was the one inside her baby boy, a flimsy, fragile little chip upon the tides of time. However, it would not be Katharine's fault, if time were not soon exchanged for eternity.

Not that Katharine abused the child, though; not that she exactly neglected it. She chose its clothing and food with a proper degree of care; she consulted more than one efficient matron of Saint Peter's congregation, before she accepted the references of the nurse. That done, she left the child's routine chiefly to the nurse; to the nurse exclusively she left all the more tender ministrations to the little, dawning personality. Upon one point, however, she stood firm. When the child was ailing, it should be brought at once to her for succour. It should be healed by the power of her mind, not poisoned by the nostrums of a man like Doctor Keltridge, good as gold, but slavish in his adherence to the foolish old traditions.

Therefore it came about that, when the cruel dog days fell upon the town, when baby after baby became a victim to their scourge until at last it was the Brenton baby's turn, then Katharine suddenly discovered that mind was a poor weapon against incipient dysentery. She fought the disease most valiantly; she even stayed at home for two entire days, holding the baby in one arm, a fat black volume in the other hand, reading and pondering by turns. Being human and feminine and, by this time, a little tired, it is not to be wondered at that occasionally her mind wandered a little from the child to the best amount of starch for muslin frocks. Still, as a whole, she held herself fairly steady; and, by the end of the third day, she was rejoiced to find the child was on the gain. Openly and aloud, she proceeded to give testimony as concerned this test case. To Brenton she talked of it incessantly, in the hope of assisting his conversion to her standards. Unhappily, Brenton, after talking with Doctor Keltridge, and heavily bribing the nurse to hold her tongue, knew more about the causes of the cure than Katharine did, and hence his conversion was not greatly expedited by it.

It was a good ten days afterward, a good week after his talk with Doctor Keltridge, that Brenton dropped in at the Keltridges', one morning, to make his report upon the child. It was the ending of the office hour; three or four patients still were awaiting their turns for consultation. Accordingly, Olive, meeting Brenton on the steps, took him to the library to wait.

"No use your going in there to sit with all the other germs," she told him lightly, as she removed her hat pins and took off her hat. "Come in here, and tell me how the boy is getting on. Better, I hope."

"Yes, better. Still, it is slow to get him up again. Babies are such frail little things; a breath can send them up or down. Of course, I am very anxious."

Olive took swift note of the singular number of the pronoun; its very unconsciousness made it the more ominous. It was really that which framed her answer.

"Yes; but you have a treasure of a nurse. Mrs. Prather tells me that she is a host in herself."

As Olive spoke, she flattered herself that she had bridged the chasm successfully. A glance at Brenton, though, assured her that he had been momentarily aware of the existence of the chasm. Hastily she changed the subject, too hastily, as it proved, to select her new theme with care.

"My father has been telling me a little bit about your future plans, Mr. Brenton."

"My plans?"

She mistook his question utterly.

"No need to worry," she said, with a sudden accent of hauteur. "Of course, I never should think of speaking of them to any outsider. But my father has a trick of talking most things over with me; we have been alone together for so long."

"Of course. There is no reason that you shouldn't know. Besides, it will be an open secret soon. As soon as things are settled with the trustees, I shall resign."

"I am very sorry," Olive said quite simply.

His colour came.

"It is the only honourable thing for me to do, Miss Keltridge."

"I know that," she told him, with a swift return to her old downrightness. "And I am sorry for you, yourself. You must have suffered, in this whole thing, a great deal more than any of us know."

For an instant, his gray eyes deepened, burned. He started to hold out his hand to hers; then he checked the gesture.

"I have. It's not an easy thing to do, Miss Keltridge, the sliding out of a concrete and detailed theology into a something that at best is—"

She cut off his final word.

"I know. Doubting isn't so easy as most people imagine it to be. And you—It must have been fearful."

"To have had such doubts?" he assented musingly. "Yes—"

Again she cut him off, this time rather unexpectedly. Brenton was conscious of a momentary wonder whether her sympathy was less than she had led him to anticipate.

"No; to have had such beliefs, in the first place. If only they had been a little milder, you never would have distrusted them. It's nothing but the rasping surface of a creed that sets the doubts to working."

He tried to conceal a slight sense of hurt beneath his laugh at the concrete image called into being by her words.

"Like ivy poison, when you rub it, and it spreads? Perhaps." Then suddenly his eyes went grave. "The curious fact about it all, Miss Keltridge, is that our beliefs never take half the hold on us that our doubts do. My inherited notions of original sin and a violent conversion never by any chance could have upset my worldly advancement. This last phase of my querying—to phrase it mildly—is going to overturn my—" And, for the first time in her knowledge of him, Olive heard his laugh ring bitter; "my whole scheme of domestic economics."

Bitter as was his laugh, though, Brenton's face was only sad. To Olive, watching him and suddenly grown aware of his weakness, it was plain that life was taking it out of him rather badly, plain that the man before her was hungering for comprehension, comfort. What did he get of that sort, at home?

Once again, at her own question, Olive felt the chasm widening between them, felt it and instinctively detested it. Still, she could not keep her mind from lingering an instant on the wonder whether, if Brenton's wife had been sensitive, unselfish, alert to supply, in so far as lay within her, the sympathy of which he plainly was in need, the present crisis ever would have dawned. She doubted. If ever there had been a case where a wife had muddled things by her total lack of comprehension, here it was. A blind intolerance would have been nothing by comparison.

Suddenly she threw back her shoulders and lifted up her head. It was morally and socially impossible to be heaping all the blame, even of a mental crisis, on the wife. She, as a woman, owed the other woman more sufferance than that. And Brenton was disappointingly weak. No strong man would have fallen down in such a muddle, by reason of a tempest in his spiritual teapot. Besides, if he had steadied to his strain, he might perhaps have held his wife also steady, might even have prevented her allegiance to her new creed. Olive's innate sense of justice demanded division of the blame.

Yet, as the girl pronounced her judgments on both Brenton and his wife, she was conscious of an immense wave of pity which spent itself entirely upon Brenton. Brenton was weak, was futile, disappointing; nevertheless, it was plain that he was suffering keenly. And, just because the nature of his suffering was so alien to all her own life's standards, it impressed itself on Olive as the grim, silent endurance of Reed Opdyke had never done. Reed was Reed, a solid fact past all gainsaying; his point of view had become one of the necessities of her daily life. Always she could predict with just how great a degree of manliness he would bear himself. As for Brenton—

To her extreme surprise, Olive's mind stopped short, and refused to continue the comparison.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The curate, after the manner of his kind, was having tea with a feminine member of his congregation. This time, the honour had fallen upon Olive, who had received it with temperate resignation rather than exuberant joy. Divested of his bunny hood, the curate was a weedy young man with painfully good intentions and a receding chin. Furthermore, he confessed to liking caraway seed in his tea cakes. In other words, the trail of his nursery was still upon him. Accordingly, to atone for the skim-milk quality of his conversation, Olive habitually refused him cream in his tea, and squeezed in lemon juice until he cried aloud for mercy.

On this particular afternoon, quite as a matter of course, the talk had turned on Brenton. Indeed, it seemed to Olive, nowadays, that the talk invariably did turn on Brenton. All summer long, his matrimonial incongruities, to use no stronger term for the domestic ecclesiastical situation, had furnished talk for half the tea tables in town. Moreover, it was only when a man was present that any woman lifted up her voice in Katharine's defence. Left to themselves, they knew perfectly well that all the scholarly stoops and resonant voices and luminous gray eyes in all creation were not responsible for their universal sympathy for Brenton. The woman was a toad, a selfish and ambitious toad, hopping, hopping, hopping up across the surface of the human pyramid before her. However, in the presence of an occasional tea-drinking husband, one or the other of them embraced convention and talked feelingly of Mrs. Brenton's virtues. As a rule, though, she confessed to herself later on that she had been insistently harping upon a non-existent entity.

Of late, though, a new element had crept into the talk. Without a definite word of any sort having been spoken, there was a widening circle of belief that Brenton's days at Saint Peter's were coming to an end; that he had stumbled over some obstacle in his professional pathway; in short, that he had come an ecclesiastical cropper. Just the form taken by that cropper, just when his relations with Saint Peter's would cease, just why and wherefore, just what would be the next page of Brenton's history: all this was still an enigma past all finding out. For that very reason, it added untold zest to all the cups of tea. Indeed, it had quite ousted the subject of Reed Opdyke from the public mind. Reed, in his own time, had been the one great theme. As the months ran on, though, he presented very little variety to the general eye, and one's subject must show variety at any cost. Therefore Opdyke was abandoned, and Brenton substituted in his place.

Questioned, Olive would have found it hard to tell why the inveterate harping upon Brenton vexed her so. She had been frankly irate, earlier, when the talk had turned on Opdyke; more than once, she had freed her mind and departed on her heels. However, that had been very different; very, very different. Opdyke was an individual; his predicament was a purely personal matter, concerning himself alone. He did not talk of it, himself. Therefore it seemed to Olive that there was no especial reason that all the women in town, some of them total strangers, should be babbling unceasingly about it, with every degree of curiosity and of mawkish sentiment.

But Brenton, partly by virtue of his position in the public eye, partly by reason of something in his make-up which led him to clamour forth his intellectual hardships to any sympathetic ear that offered; by that same token, Brenton seemed to the girl to be the more in need of calm protection. Reed, shut away from all the clamour, was powerless to defend himself. Brenton, timing his steps to the rhythm of the chorus, even giving an occasional metronomic signal to that chorus, was equally powerless to suppress it. The fact that the lack of power was in himself, not in circumstance: this only made it the more piteous. And Olive, listening, did pity Brenton, pity him increasingly, albeit with the pity which is not at all akin to love. It was not his own fault entirely that his virile strength was crossed by the wavering, widening line of weakness that kept him from shutting his teeth upon the results of his spiritual manœuvres; not his own fault that his analytic logic was a long way sounder than his common sense.

"Two lumps, Mr. Ross?" Olive queried, over the second cup of tea. She knew quite well that the question would stamp her once and for all as a careless hostess. Nevertheless, she asked it, as her only means of deflecting the talk from Brenton.

The curate gave a soft and patient sigh.

"No sugar, Miss Keltridge," he corrected her gently; "and, if you don't mind, please not quite so much lemon. There!" He lifted his hand appealingly.

But Olive, smiling brightly back at him, gave the uncut half of lemon another squeeze in her strong and supple fingers.

"Oh, but you will learn to like it in time, Mr. Ross. Then you will wonder how you even tolerated it in any other way."

"I dare say," the curate murmured meekly, as he took the cup.

"Indeed, I know," Olive assured him easily. "When I was young, I used to take it with all sorts of cream in it; but now—" She shook her head. Then she added suavely, "You are sure it is quite all right, Mr. Ross?"

The curate took a courteous taste. Then he strangled a little, not so much, though, at the tea as at the coming falsehood.

"Oh, very!" he said politely, and then he took to stirring his tea with suspicious fervour.

"How strange it always seems to have the town fill up again!" Olive observed, still determined to keep the talk away from Brenton. "And yet, we miss the girls, when they are gone."

"We miss them at the church," the curate answered with unexpected energy. "They increase the offertory at least twenty-five per cent, and they keep the choir boys from flatting on their upper notes. I had never seen a girls' college, till I came here; but I can't help thinking it has its own disadvantages. I like them in the aggregate, Miss Keltridge; but I can't seem to get on with them individually. They are so distressingly young. I leave all that to Mr. Brenton."

"He has been most successful," Olive assented tamely.

"Yes. He has a way with women, as they say; he manages them by the ears. At least—I mean—" The curate, confounded by the hideous mental picture that he had evoked, was floundering helplessly.

"Exactly," Olive assented once more.

The curate rallied.

"And yet, they all adore him," he concluded. "That is the strange thing about Mr. Brenton, Miss Keltridge. He manages most women grandly," the curate, sure that he had retrieved his error, in his self-gratulation promptly slipped into a second one; "but that suffragette wife of his—"

"Mrs. Brenton is not a suffragette," Olive interposed hurriedly.

"No? Well, she might as well be. She's Christian Scientist, and that is only the next thing to it. Besides, she is terribly masterful, is Mrs. Brenton. Take the case of the baby, for instance: no matter what happens to be the trouble with the little one, Mrs. Brenton won't allow a grain of calomel inside the house. I call it—"

"Olive!" It was the voice of the doctor, speaking from the threshold; and the voice was weighted with anxiety. "Can you be excused for just one minute?"

With a little gesture of apology, Olive left her place beside the tray, and went in the direction of the voice. She overtook her father in his consulting-room, where he was pacing the floor, fists in his pockets, hair awry and his face singularly dark and haggard.

"Olive," he said abruptly, as his daughter came in sight; "can you possibly send off that snippet, and go down to the Opdykes' for an hour?"

"I suppose I can. Is anything the matter?"

"Yes, and no. There's nothing new, exactly; but they all are—getting on their nerves. I've been down there, half the afternoon, trying to steady them; but it is a case where they need a woman. If you can go, Olive? And don't come back, until you can't do another thing for any of them. No matter if it does take it out of you; I can patch you up again, all right. And they all want you. Mrs. Opdyke asked if you would come." The doctor came to a full halt, his face very red, his eyes suffused, and fell to rubbing both hands through and through his hair.

Olive waited a full minute before she spoke. When she did speak, her clear young voice was steady and authoritative.

"Father, what is it? Something must be very wrong. Is Reed—worse?"

"No."

"Then what is it?"

The doctor's face grew redder still. Then, of a sudden, the words flew from him in a great gulp of woe.

"He told me, early this afternoon, what he claims to have known surely for a long, long time: that there is no chance for him to gain; that the lower part of his body is absolutely dead; that all our treatment, all our experimenting on it has not affected it at all; that, till the day he dies, he's bound to stay there just as you see him now, half of him perfectly well, half of him a senseless log."

Olive whitened, whitened. There came a faint blue line about her mouth, and her eyes glittered, hot and dry. Nevertheless,—

"You believe it?" she asked steadily.

"I didn't, at the first. In the end, he made me."

The white changed into gray, and the blue line widened.

"I'll go at once," she said briefly. "Please tell Mr. Ross I have been called out on an important errand."

For Olive Keltridge would not flinch, even in this present crisis. If Reed was in this final, consummating agony, and needed her, it was for her to go.

Five minutes later, the curate safely shunted to the front door and through it, the doctor came back again to Olive, a wine glass in his hand. She told him with a gesture that she preferred to be without it.

"You needn't worry," she said quietly, as she settled her hat and gave a touch or two to her crisp white gown; "I promise you I won't disgrace you. I shall go through it better, if I rely just on my nerves, not on a stimulant."

"But it is going to be a bad half-hour for you, Olive."

"Do you suppose I don't know that? Reed and I have been chums since I was three years old; I don't want to watch—"

But the doctor interrupted.

"It isn't Reed you'll have to watch. He will be watching you, trying to let you down as easily as he can. It's like the boy to take in the fact that this thing isn't going to be altogether easy for a few of us others to accept. As far as he is concerned, he's very quiet; his main anxiety appears to be for the effect of the shock on other people. You won't have any scene with Reed; he'll look out for that. It's his father and mother who are the present problem."

"They are—" Olive hesitated for a word.

"The professor is crushed, stunned. It never once has seemed to cross his mind that this thing could be final; and now the fact has knocked him over. As for Mrs. Opdyke, I worry less. She has lost all grip on herself and is hysterical, with Ramsdell in attendance till I can send somebody in. That leaves Reed alone, to hear the echoes of the general unsettlement, and to think them over. Damn it all, Olive! It's bad enough to be knocked out, in the first place; but it's a long way worse to be out of it and to know that you are being wailed over. Mrs. Opdyke is having a veritable wake. For heaven's sake, hurry down there and see if you can't help Ramsdell to steady her down. If you can't, then let her wake it out to her heart's content, and you go up and talk to Reed. Else, he'll go mad."

And Olive went.

As the doctor had foretold, she found the house in psychological chaos. In the library, the professor sat alone beside his desk. Of a sudden, he had turned to the likeness of an old, old man, shrunken and bowed with a grief which, taking his vitality drop by drop, had left him in this present, final crisis, inert, passive, apathetic. He greeted Olive listlessly, answered a question so vaguely as to warn her that any effort on her part to rouse him would be worse than useless, worse because it would change his apathy into renewed despair. For a few minutes, the girl stood beside him, watching him silently, realizing that the shock had been so sudden that it had taken away the power to feel. Like a man knocked out in battle, he only had a dim realization that he had been shot down, pierced in some vital part. It would take him a long time to become aware of just the nature of his injury.

In the next room, Ramsdell was busy with Mrs. Opdyke, very busy, as Olive saw, once she crossed the threshold. She also saw that Ramsdell was as gentle as a woman in the crisis, as gentle and infinitely more strong. There was really nothing for her to do, nothing that Ramsdell, trained for such emergencies, could not do far, far better. And the hysterical sobbing, the moans of the mother's anguish, could be plainly heard through all the silent house. Olive pitied Mrs. Opdyke most intensely; but she was conscious of a sudden longing to administer a restorative box on the ear. It was unthinkable, to her young, elastic strength, that any one could be so weak as to throw over self-control completely; unthinkable that any mother could become so strident in her selfish agony of pity for her stricken son, when she could so much better be holding herself and him quite steady by her brave acceptance of untoward fortune. But then, Mrs. Opdyke was an older woman, and of more feminine mould. Besides, she had had an eighteen-month-long strain, and, moreover, she was Reed's mother, while she herself, Olive, was nothing but a rank outsider, and consequently callous. She did her best to dismiss her longing to smite the wailing Mrs. Opdyke; but the blue ring once more settled about her lips, as she went slowly up the stairs.

In Reed's room everything was curiously unchanged, curiously unlike the spiritual chaos below stairs. The September sunshine came sifting in through the tree tops to dapple with level spots of light the silky surface of the rug; the soft breeze stirred the curtains and then passed on to ruffle the curly mop of bright brown hair that gleamed like polished chestnuts in the sun. After the excitement and the tragedy of the lower rooms, this place seemed as quiet as a sanctuary; and Reed's face matched the quiet, as he turned his eyes to Olive.

"I suppose you know it, too," he said quite steadily. "I wanted to tell you, myself; but I couldn't seem to brace myself to the actual putting it into words. No; don't go to spilling any tears, Olive; it is too late for that. In fact," and then, just for a moment, the hand outstretched on the rug shut till the nails bit into the softness of the palm; "there is a certain relief in having it out and over, and all settled. We both of us have known we were facing the chance of it. Now we know the worst, and can take it as it comes."

Despite the little quiver of his voice upon the final words, there was a curious peace in his face, the light like nothing else on land and sea. Olive watched it, for a minute, through the blinding, burning tears. Then, forgetful of her promise to her father, she flung herself down on her knees beside the couch, and fell to sobbing like a little child.

She steadied herself soon, however; but not until, with a greater effort than she ever knew, Reed stretched out his arm to its fullest reach and laid his hand upon her cheek, her hair.

"Yes, Olive," he said, very low. "I am glad it hurts you just a little. I wanted you to care."

Then sharply he withdrew his hand and put it out of sight beneath the rug. When once more he spoke, his voice had its old resonance.

"Don't take it too hard, Olive," he bade her cheerily. "I was rather a selfish beast not to have told you earlier, instead of letting you go on hoping for the unattainable. Feeling better? That's good. Of course, we were bound to make our moan together; we've been chums too long to miss that, and there's much more comfort to be taken in a duet of misery than in a pair of separate solos. Now just tell me once for all that you are infernally sorry, and we'll consider that matter settled for all time. Sure you're all right? There's some wine, over in that closet. No? Well, then I'd like to suggest that your hat is rampantly askew. Harrowing scenes aren't good for millinery. Yes, that's straight. Now do haul up a chair, and we'll proceed to talk this thing out to the bitter end. There's no denying that I've made a mess of life by my own recklessness; but apparently I've got to go on living, just the same. Therefore, if you don't mind, suppose we plan how I can go to work to pick up the pieces."

And while, below stairs, Reed Opdyke's parents were prostrate in their sorrow, it was in this fashion that Olive Keltridge, sitting by his side, tried to help him to face forward steadily, and to pick up the useful fragments left of his broken life.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Saint Peter's Parish was fifteen miles and a consequent half-hour of time from the nearest fount of Christian Science teaching. Hence it resulted that only rarely had Katharine been used to refresh herself in the tenets of her new theology. In part, this came from her natural self-reliance, coupled with an indolence which made her shrink from the needful effort to catch an early train. In part, it came out of Brenton's heedful planning. Regretting, as he could not fail to do, his wife's allegiance to a creed so alien to the shreds of his own belief, not daring to oppose her absolutely in its observance, he contrived to strew her path with the accumulated petty obstacles which are so much more insurmountable than any single great one. He never set back the hands of the clock to make her miss her train; neither did he lock her in her room. He merely found out at the last minute that he needed one of the small personal services which only a wife can give.

And Katharine, by the very nature of her new and optimistic creed, was powerless to stand out against him. Earlier, fathoming his purposes, she would have raged, have burst into a passion. Now she could only minister to him with an impassive calm, while, in her secret heart, she was piously commending him to the attention of the Universal Mind for discipline. Unhappily for Katharine, however, the Universal Mind appeared to be engaged in some other direction, and Brenton, for the present, was left to go scot free.

This had been the state of the case, ever since the early spring, and Katharine felt the private and personal fount of sanctity within her to be running dry. She was just making up her mind to break away at any cost, when a new complication arose in the person of the baby. Not that Katharine's devotion to her child would have led her to any especial sacrifice, however. Indeed, there was no need for that. The nurse had proved herself an efficient substitute in any normal crisis; and any abnormal one, Katharine believed, could be controlled as well by absent treatment as by present. Unhappily, Katharine had reckoned without taking into account either Brenton's wilful allegiance to the old-fashioned notions of disease, or the nurse's abject allegiance to the father of her puny charge.

For, as the time ran on, no one could deny that the child was puny, that his birthright of health was dwindling fast. And, while it dwindled, the heat came on, and then the stifling dog days. It was a season when the lustiest of children wilted with the damp, depressing heat; and the Brenton baby, never lusty, wilted with them. Katharine treated him with conscientious regularity; but dog days and consequent dysentery proved too strenuous a claim for her to fight alone, and more and more eagerly she longed for the succour of the nearest local representative of the Mother Church.

Nevertheless, the more she longed, the more she shrank from carrying into effect her longing. Three days before this time, Brenton had come in upon her, sitting beside the weazen child, her eyes on space, her lips moving in silent self-communion. Across the room, the nurse was sobbing into her handkerchief. Now and then, between her sobs, she lifted up her irate eyes to glare upon the placid face beside the little crib.

Brenton had asked a question. Before Katharine could answer, the nurse had cut in and given him a few facts: hours and amounts and consequent symptoms which she deemed disturbing. And then, in a voice which made a curious contrast to the agitation of the nurse, Katharine had urged them to wait, quiet, until she had put the little human creature, suffering from some hidden sin or lack of faith, into a more total communion with the Infinite, the Healer; had even begged them not to allow their ill-concealed doubts to delay the perfect cure.

The nurse, heedless of the Infinite, the Healer, had interposed with a few more facts; had pointed out that physical mal-nutrition can not be made good by a diet of compressed air, however theological that air may be. The baby needed, not the Infinite, but finite stimulants and predigested foods. It needed to be left in peace and quiet, not be stirred up to listen to what, in her increasing ire, the nurse termed mummery and flummery. As for sin, the poor baby wasn't the sinner. It hadn't gone and neglected its only son—

In mercy, less for the logic of the nurse and the consequent feelings of his wife, than for his own nerves, Brenton interrupted. Like most men between two women, he only made the matter infinitely worse. There was a discussion; then there were words. Then Brenton lost his temper and departed on his heels, leaving his wife, the nurse, and the fretful baby wailing aloud in a discordant trio. As a natural result, Katharine forgot the needs of the child and sought the healing contact of the All-Mind upon her own account, while the nurse, drying her tears in haste, seized the child in one arm, the opportunity in the other, and administered the simple remedies she always kept on hand. Brenton, meanwhile, sought Doctor Keltridge. Half an hour later, he was back again, the doctor by his side.

The old doctor, dragged helter-skelter from his laboratory, was in wildest disarray, and his eyes were still a little vague, as he followed Brenton up the stairs to the nursery. Across the threshold of the nursery, however, the vagueness vanished; the eyes grew keen as sharp-pointed bits of steel, yet strangely gentle, while he sat down beside the crib and laid one mammoth brown hand above the scrawny little claw. Then, for just a minute, the keen eyes narrowed to a line. A minute afterward, he looked up and smiled across at Brenton.

"Yes, the little chap is sick, this time; it is about as well you called me in. It's been a bad summer for the children; he's had to take his turn with the rest of them, and it has pulled him down. Poor little youngster!" And one huge forefinger gently hooked itself into the neck of the little gown, drew it away and disclosed the piteous leanness of the throat and chest beneath, the fragile leanness of the baby bird just fallen from the nest. "Poor little youngster!" he repeated. "He has had a hard time of it in this world. Sometimes it does seem as if they didn't start with quite a fair chance."

"Doctor," the word came with something that was very like a groan; "I have done my best."

The doctor stopped him instantly.

"Brenton, I know that. You've had a bad time, too. Don't think for a minute I am forgetting that, even if I don't say too much about it. It's extra hard, in this case, for the boy was perfectly strong, when he was born."

"You mean—" Brenton's mouth had suddenly gone so dry that he could not finish out the phrase.

The doctor did not falter.

"Brenton, if I am to help you keep the boy, I shall have to talk to you brutally. The baby was born all right, healthy as a child could be, tough and strong enough for a dozen children. However, every baby needs a little nursing, needs a little dosing now and then, even if he is healthy. That is what your baby hasn't had. Mrs. Brenton, with the best will in the world, has fed him any sort of milk from any sort of cows, and she has counted on the Infinite to sterilize the milkman's fingers. And, in all probability, the Infinite didn't do it. Too busy, likely, in sterilizing the youngster's mind. Then, when a dose of honest castor oil would have made good the trouble, she gave him a dose of Science and Health, instead. It may be all right in theory; in this practical case, she might just as well have rolled up the inspired pages into pills and have poked them down the baby's throat." And then the doctor pulled himself up. "However, that's done with. Now, if you'll stand by me and see that my orders are carried out, I'll fall to work and try my best to undo the harm. You'll see me through, Brenton? It will keep you on duty steadily; but it is the one thing that will save your child."

"Of course. Go on." Then Brenton shut his teeth.

"Nurse, have you been able to give—" And the doctor put her through a searching catechism. Then, "So far, so good. I am glad you kept your head; it was the one chance. Now, suppose we look a little closer."

To Brenton, watching intently, it seemed almost impossible that those great, acid-stained hands could stir, then lift, the little form so tenderly. Indeed, once on the doctor's knee, the baby nestled weakly to the curve of his rough coat sleeve, the heavy lids lifted and the weazen face lighted with the ghost of a tired little smile. Then the lids fell heavily once more; but once more, also, there was the faintly nestling motion of the wee, weary body against the strong, kind arm. And, above the little body, the doctor's face, intently bent over the child, was lighted with a swift reflection from the greater light of the All-Father, yet above.

"Poor little kiddie!" he said slowly. "It's a close shave for him, Brenton; but, if you'll stand by and help, please God, we'll save him yet."

And Brenton did stand by, all evening long and all the night. The nurse was with him, watching. Katharine, furious beneath her scientific calm, came and went at intervals; but the doctor's bottle and spoon were in the breast pocket of Brenton's clerical coat, the doctor's written schedule was set down in duplicate on Brenton's cuff. And Brenton, too tired to be really weary, never once left his chair beside the frilly crib.

Later on, he never could remember what were his thoughts, that night. Being human and very wide awake, he must have thought something; but, ransack his mind as he would, nothing coherent ever came back to him out of the half-forgotten chaos. Indeed, it was as if his whole nature, body, mind, and spirit, were focussing itself upon one passionate desire that his child might live. Not that he consciously prayed. What was there that he could pray to, or for? Laws did not stop their working, to prolong one baby life. Useless to ask for mere futilities. Useless and totally irreverent to insult the Deity by suggesting to Him, however prayerfully, that He had made a bad mistake; that, were His attention only called to the mistake, doubtless He would be glad to set it right while time still remained to Him. And, if the mistake were not set right? If—well—if the child did—die, what then? Did that weazen little body, that mind as yet unopened to any but the simplest of sensations: did these hold within themselves the germs of conscious immortality? Or would the tiny flake of snow upon the desert's dusty waste vanish within its hour or two, be gone? The bud, cut from the rose, may open a bit, when placed in water; then it fades, and dies, and leaves no seed behind. In the same way, the budding life, cut from the parent stem—Who had cut it, though: God, or Katharine, or merely inexorable law? Brenton smothered a groan. Then, because law was inexorable, he cast aside his wonderings, looked at his cuff, at his watch, and shut his fingers upon the bottle and the spoon.

As for Katharine, it would have been well-nigh impossible for any one outside the influence of the mysterious tenets of her scientific creed, to analyze all she felt, that night. Moreover, her insulted creed, had the truth been told, seemed to herself scarcely more to be considered than her insulted self. The child was her own property. She had given it birth; it was for her alone to dictate its experiences. It was her child; not in any actual sense the child of Brenton. And Brenton, too, was hers. Little as she might have come to love him—for by now Katharine had passed the epoch where she reckoned him as anything beyond a subject for critical analysis and consequent deploring—little as she might have come to love him, he was yet her husband and so, in a sense, her chattel. It was for her to rule them both, her husband and her child; she should be dominant, they humbly subject. And now, all of a sudden, they both of them had thrown off her dominance, the child unconsciously, Brenton of his full volition. Apart from any question of the theologic controversy, the household had cast aside her sway, had, in a sense and temporarily, deposed her from her domestic throne, she the strong one of them all. Only her stoically optimistic creed kept Katharine, alone in her own room, from biting at her carefully-groomed finger tips.

And, besides, there was the question of the theologic controversy. What right had Brenton, or the nurse, or the meddlesome old doctor with his hair on end and without his cuffs, to come inside her house and overset her religion? To elevate their own, instead? It was her religion, just as it was her house, her child. And her religion was good. Else, she never would have adopted it. What matter if their cruder minds must have the crass physical details of bottles and spoons with which to fight sin-born disease? What if their narrow blindness destroyed their vision of the all-embracing, all-compelling Mind, source of Holiness, and of Knowledge, and, by consequence, of Health? Should she, by reason of their ignoble interferences and persecutions, yield her own allegiance to the Higher Light? Not she! Rather would she fling herself, heart and soul, into the freshening tide of her own visible church. Out of its ritual only, could she gain new fervour to bear and endure and then, if need be, fight for her spiritual freedom. It was only what the martyrs of old had done; only the work which fell upon the upholders of any new religion.

Katharine, walking the floor of her own room, that night, forgot the holy calm born of the Universal Mind and its optimistic tenets, and by slow degrees lashed herself into a scientific replica of a nervous tantrum. Described in unscientific language, she was a mere shaking bundle of injured and angry egotism. In the language of her creed, she was a suffering, striving martyr. Her martyrdom, moreover, led her to order breakfast served to her in her own room. It also led her to eat hungrily, in the intervals of making her toilet for the train.

She was already hatted and gloved, when Brenton discovered her intention.

"You are not going out, Katharine?" he asked, with the curious lack of tact which all men show at times.

"I am."

"But—the baby?"

"Baby is better. I have just been in to see him," she replied, as she buttoned her coat, and then flicked a grain of dust from its sleeve.

Brenton shut his lips for just a minute. Then,—

"Katharine," he said very gravely; "you must have seen that the baby is only just alive."

Katharine's glance was resting anxiously upon a drop or two of water on the fingers of her glove. She seemed not to have heard her husband's words. He repeated them.

"Katharine, can't you see that our baby, our little boy, is going fast?"

Katharine looked up.

"Nonsense, Scott!" she said, with perfect calm. "The baby is as well as he was, last night. If he is so desperately ill, the nurse wouldn't have gone away and left him all alone, as I found him. The nurse knows what she is about; that is," swiftly she corrected herself; "she would, if Doctor Keltridge would let her alone. If anything does happen to the child, it will be through you."

"Through me?" Brenton whitened.

"Yes," Katharine answered, reckless of her husband's hurt, reckless, too, of the probable state of his nerves, after his all-night vigil. "I could have cured baby, if you had kept out of it. Your doctors' poisons have done harm enough; but your fears, your distrust, have been the final touch. If you had let me alone, I could have saved him. Even now, it may not be too late." She turned, her chin in the air and her eyes bright with anger, although about her lips there lurked a little smile of pleasure in what seemed to her her own excessive self-control.

Brenton's self-control, though, was the greater. However much his voice might shake, the hand he laid upon her arm was singularly steady.

"Katharine, my dear wife," he said; "I must beg you not to go away from the house just now."

"Why not?" Katharine's voice was metallic in its hardness.

"I am afraid you will be sorry for ever, if you do. The baby—"

She shook his hand away.

"It is for the baby I am going, Scott. Here and alone, I am powerless to counteract the harm you do. I must have help."

"What help?" he asked her hoarsely, while his eyes, almost unseeingly, were busy with a thin trickle of water that clung to the front breadths of her pale-brown gown.

"The help of my church, of their combined prayers. Alone, I can do nothing. I must ask them all to help me, if my baby boy is to be saved from the consequences of his father's doubts."

"Katharine!"

But, with a flutter of her skirts, she had vanished from the room, smiling and self-reliant and very, very smug. To her belief, she had borne down the ignorant oppression of the unbeliever; she had given testimony to her indomitable confidence in her new creed; she was about to give still stronger testimony to the indomitable healing power of that same creed.

And Brenton, left alone, shut his teeth hard upon the ugly words that struggled to his lips. Then, white and wan, less from his all-night vigil than from the five-minute altercation with his wife, he turned away and re-entered the room where the child was lying.

It needed no eye skilled in watching the advance of death to be aware that the little life was ebbing fast. The look of waxiness had been increasing, all night long; the breathing was becoming fitful; the tiny figure seemed relaxed in every weakening limb. The eyes, though heavy and lustreless, were wide, wide open, and the white little lips wavered into a ghost of a smile, as Brenton crossed the threshold. Then one little hand stirred ever so slightly, strove to lift itself in greeting, failed.

"Daddy's boy!" Brenton said, as bravely as he could.

The ghost of the smile grew a bit stronger, as Brenton sat down beside the crib and, after his custom of these later days, held out one brown forefinger. Instantly, the wan little claw closed around the finger, the baby nestled slightly, and then fell into a light doze.

The nurse's voice, when she spoke, failed to penetrate the doze.

"I called up Doctor Keltridge, and he said he had a broken hip to set at once. It may be two hours, before he can get here. He told me to keep up the stimulant."

"You have used it?"

"Once, while you were talking to Mrs. Brenton. It is nearly time, again."

"Did it——" Brenton's voice failed him utterly.

The nurse hedged.

"It is too soon yet to know. The second dose ought to show more."

But the second dose did not show, nor yet the third. After the fourth one, the nurse looked up.

"Can you telephone to Mrs. Brenton?" she asked.

"You think?"

"That she should be here. Can you get her?"

And then Brenton was forced to confess the truth. The nurse accepted the truth as mercifully as she was able.

"Poor little woman!" she said. "Isn't it wonderful the hold the thing gets—"

Her question was never ended. Instead, she laid her hand on Brenton's sleeve.

"Look!" she whispered.

All at once, the doze had ended. With its ending, all look of tiredness and suffering had gone away out of the baby face. Instead, the little eyes were eager; the little lips were breaking into a smile of utter joyousness; the little arms were up-stretched strongly, the hands wide open and shaking in happy recognition.

"Nurse!" Then Brenton steadied himself with a mighty effort, and bent forward to hold out his arms. "Daddy take boy?" he urged gently, in his accustomed phrase.

There came an instantaneous check upon the baby's eagerness. The head turned, while the eyes met Brenton's without a spark of response. Then once again the little arms shot upward above the brightening face where the eager look of recognition was changing fast to a happiness ineffable, to a glad surety that the vision opened to the baby eyes alone was far beyond the dreams which mortal mind could fashion.

Then the little arms dropped backward; but the ineffable happiness remained.

Gently, very gently, Scott Brenton folded the baby hands across the muslin nightie, and smoothed the ruffled baby hair above the waxy brow. Then, half unconsciously,—

"For Thine is the Kingdom," he said.

And then, a little later on, he wondered why he had said it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The opening of the second semester of the college year found Instructor Brenton busy with his classes.

Conservative old Saint Peter's had taken the upheaval badly, not so much the theoretic questions at stake regarding the soundness of their rector's doctrine, as the loss of their rector himself. The older members of the congregation loved Brenton as a son, the younger ones as something a little dearer than a brother. One and all, they missed his pastoral visitations, his incisive sermons on the righteousness of honest living; above all else, they missed his voice. If they could have kept these personal marks of the man himself, their rector might have been welcome to believe anything he chose. He was their shepherd and their friend. His curate was there to supply theology enough to answer for them both.

However, Brenton, once his resignation was handed in, turned a deaf ear alike to argument and coaxing. The reason for his resignation he had insisted on setting forth downrightly: he was able no longer to affirm absolute belief in some of the main tenets of his church. The entire community loved Brenton. Now it gave proof of that love in a most loyal fashion. It neither gossiped, nor indulged in undue speculation; it merely did its best to accept the given explanation in all simplicity, and say as little about it as was possible. How well it lived up to its efforts was another question.

Of course, one little circle of Brenton's intimates, the Keltridges and the Opdykes and the Dennisons, talked of the matter freely among themselves, discussing causes, watching for effects. They regretted the necessity for change, doubted it, even. Granted the necessity, though, they rejoiced that Brenton could be transplanted from one calling to the other, without the need for their losing him from their midst. It was Brenton the friend they cared for; not Brenton the preacher and pastor of souls. Moreover, there was not one of them who, asked, would have hesitated to affirm that now at last Scott Brenton was entering upon his true calling. Indeed, had not Professor Opdyke the word of his old colleague, Professor Mansfield, to that effect? Had not Professor Mansfield, even, left his classroom, in the middle of the term, for the sake of appearing before the trustees of the college, and giving his vehement testimony to that same effect?

The college, that section of the college, at least, which dealt with the chemical department, rejoiced greatly, when once Scott Brenton was launched upon his lecture courses. Doctor Keltridge, trustee and medical adviser, though, had a double cause for his rejoicing. Not only did he believe that at last Brenton was the right peg in the proper hole; but he was overjoyed at the possibility of what the change might accomplish in the man himself. Brenton, on the morning that his child had died, had lost something which he never would regain. In more senses than one, his wife and he, henceforward, would be twain, not the one flesh ordained by matrimony. In the hour of his supreme need, Katharine had left him and had gone her scientific way. In that hour, moreover, his little son, pledge of their closest union, had been taken from him; and Brenton was only too well aware that now no second and similar pledge would ever be. In the eyes of the world and of the literal law, Katharine was still his wife. In the eye of the spirit, she was holding herself as far aloof from him as if their marriage had never taken place, so far aloof that, nowadays, Brenton scarcely felt the friction of her presence.

For the first month and the second, this aloofness came upon Scott Brenton's nerves, and drove him well-nigh mad. Night after night, he tramped the floor, asking himself in vain if such a situation could develop, without some fault upon his side. Day after day, he strove most conscientiously to renew the old relations with his wife. He might as well have tried to exhume his baby son and blow in the breath of life between the folded lips. The one was no more dead than was the other. Moreover, as he had been in no conscious sense the cause of either tragedy, so in no sense could he be the conscious cure. The forces culminating in his present trouble had been set in motion long, long before the hour when Catie had poked her curly head in at the gate. Critical, censorious and selfishly ambitious in her little childhood, her womanhood had strengthened along these well-marked lines, and the lines had led her infallibly into the net of the shallowest, most smug religion that ever has set forth a plausible excuse for total selfishness. Once she was landed in the net, the rest was simple. She was in growing harmony with Universal Mind. Whatever thing opposed her viewpoint was out of harmony, and therefore sinful and laden with incipient disease, curable only so far as it yielded allegiance to her scientific doctrine.

And that allegiance Brenton would not yield. In that one matter, he stood firm, albeit he realized but too well that his firmness jeopardized for ever his relations with his wife. After the funeral of their little son, there had been two stormy scenes between them, and then a silence more pregnant of disaster than any storm could ever be. Katharine smiled, and carried her chin high in the air. Brenton's head was bowed between his shoulders; he walked heavily, his eyes upon the ground. Indeed, the two of them were equally lacking in elasticity. Katharine's tension was too great to admit of any margin for spring. Brenton's relaxation was too complete to leave any one aware that a spring ever had existed.

As the weeks ran on into months, the spiritual separation between them grew more definite. There was no friction, no clashing. They were too remote from each other for that. They met at meals as usual; they dined out together; occasionally they sat out a concert side by side. Apart from that, however, they went their ways without discussion. Katharine was flinging her entire enthusiasm, nowadays, into her religious life, and into its interesting corollary, the beautification of her bodily temple for the Universal Mind. She prinked and preened herself just as industriously as she conned her morocco-bound books of devotion. She went to church on Sundays with a zeal that balked at no combination of storms and mileage. Between the services, she spent the greater part of her time in the society of certain fellow scientists who lived not far away, and she emerged from their society so filled with zeal as to make small evangelistic forays into the borders of Saint Peter's Parish. Olive Keltridge was one victim. Ramsdell was another. Ramsdell, however, stated his own platform unmincingly.

"I beg your pardon for so speaking to a lady," he said crisply; "but I was born in the Established Church, and I don't go for kicking it over into a perfect slush of tommy-rot. Besides, my present job is to look out for Mr. Hopdyke, not to go off my 'ead, arguing about religion." And, with a salute more crushing than he was at all aware, Ramsdell swung on his heel and went striding away down the street.

All this was bound to tell upon a man of Brenton's calibre, the more so in that Brenton already was worn out with fighting his own personal battles of the spirit. For the first few weeks of this evident, though tacit, hostility, he suffered acutely, both from the hostility itself, and from his constant self-examinations to discover whether some fault of his had been the cause. In time, however, there came the inevitable reaction towards a sensible steadiness. Even the spirit can become callous in time, as Brenton was finding out, half to his own regret, half to his infinite relief.

Moreover, outside interests were daily growing more insistent; of necessity they crowded out a little of his personal and domestic worry. There were innumerable conferences with Doctor Keltridge and Professor Opdyke; there was one discussion with the assembled trustees of the college; there was one hard hour of explanation before the assembled wardens of the church. Last of all came the talk with his curate whom, despite his bunny hood and his archaic theological tenets, Brenton had grown to love. Up to the very hour of their talk, the callow little curate had gained no inkling of what his rector had been passing through. To his young mind, the experience was no less cruel to himself than it had been to Brenton. He had supposed that the belief of every man was cut out by a paper pattern outlined from directions in the Pentateuch, and washed in with dainty coloured borders taken from the Gospels and the Book of Revelation. It shocked him unspeakably to find that any man had dared to tear up that pattern and draft a fresh one for himself. However, as the talk went on, shock had yielded to an intense pity, born of his love for his superior officer. Brenton was mistaken, wofully mistaken; but the mistake had cost him dear. All the more, he was deserving pity upon that account. The tears stood in the little curate's honest eyes, as he gripped Brenton's hand at parting. He could not understand his rector in the least; but he could be perfectly aware that it was no small privilege to be admitted to the confidence of so upright a man.

These preliminary duties done, Brenton lost no time in making public the fact of his resignation. At the time, he was too busy with the practical details of his transplanting to pay any great heed to the storm of opposition which his resignation roused. Later on, it pleased him, just as the enthusiasm of his college classes pleased him, after it had ceased to be a fact and had turned into a memory. For the time being, though, he had stopped all feeling. Instead, he must preach his final sermons without flinching, must confine them so closely to the matter of mere practical living as to leave no loophole for dogma to creep in; he must make everything as easy as possible for his successor who, at best, was bound to have a hard time of it in starting; above all, he must help Katharine to choose exactly such a house as she wished, and to furnish it exactly as her taste should dictate. And so the pressure of outside interests fell on Scott Brenton's shoulders until, perforce, they straightened up to bear the burden. And the straightening was by no means wholly theoretical. It was an infinitely saner, sounder Brenton who faced his classes on the first morning of the new semester, than any one, watching him throughout the previous year, would have ever dared to hope.

And Doctor Keltridge, who had watched him rather hopelessly, gave great thanks accordingly.

"You've proved the wisdom of your change, Brenton," he remarked, one day.

"How is that?"

"The whole look of you. You aren't the same man you were, five months ago. Mentally and physically, you're sleeker."

Brenton laughed.

"Is that a sign of wisdom?"

The doctor met the question with composure.

"As a general thing, yes. The normal being is sleek by nature. It's only when he cramps himself that he gets wrinkled. Cramps himself, I say. Cramping from an outside source never has much effect upon him, unless he chooses to have it. No; that's not Christian Science; it's mere common sense. As a rule, the two things are incompatible. By the way, I hear that your ex-curate has been tackling your wife."

"No!"

"A fact. The boy told me. She started out to tackle him, and he clinched with her. I must say it was plucky of him, even if it didn't appear to do much good."

Brenton's gray eyes clouded.

"The only question is: what is good," he said thoughtfully.

"No question about it," the doctor blustered. "The only chance the idiot woman has—"

Brenton interrupted.

"She is my wife," he reminded the doctor.

"I don't care if she is your wife, twenty times over," Doctor Keltridge said vehemently. "We both know the infernal thing that she has done."

"But, if she believed it was right—" Brenton was beginning faintly.

The doctor bore him down.

"Because she is a semi-maniac, she's not to be encouraged in her destruction of the human race," he argued hotly. Then, as he saw the tightening and the whitening of Brenton's lips, he forgot his argument in swift contrition. "Damn it all, Brenton! I vowed I'd never mention the thing to you again, as long as I lived, and here I am again, off on the same old subject. I'm a garrulous old man; but——" his keen face softened, puckered into a score of wrinkles; "but I loved that baby boy. I brought him into the world, and I had spent no small amount of time congratulating myself upon the fact that you'd got him, at any rate; that you'd have him for a comforting little peg to hang your spiritual hat on, when you came home from preaching the gospel to a disgruntled and disgruntling world. Almost I think I felt his death more than—"

"Not more than I." Brenton faced him steadily.

"Not in one sense. And yet, I did feel it more, because, from the first, I saw how needless it would be."

But Brenton lifted up his hand.

"It's over now," he said concisely. "Why talk about it? Some memories are best off, left to perish."

And, in all truth, this was one of them. Now and then, it would stir in its grave, and lift up its ugly head for recognition; but, as a rule, the two men had done their best to heap the dust of time and forgetfulness upon its grave. And yet, certain scenes are so hideous that one never quite forgets them. It had been ordained for Brenton that the passing of his baby son should be followed by such a scene, by a discovery so tragic as to make the painless baby death sink into insignificance beside it.

It was the doctor himself who had made the discovery, made it just too late to have it do much good to any one. The nurse and Brenton were still bending above the frilly crib, smoothing out the muslin folds around the child and straightening the blankets, when the doctor came into the room, eager, his face alight with strength and purpose to do his share in what he knew too well could be only a fight to the very finish. The words of cheer died from his lips, though, as he caught sight of Brenton's face.

"Not yet?" he asked, with an abruptness far more sympathetic than any amount of tears.

"Yes. Just now."

"Impossible!" The single word was curt. Still more curt was the brief question to the nurse, "You gave the stimulant, as I ordered?"

"Three times."

"What effect did it have?"

"None."

"Impossible!" the doctor said, yet once again. "It is what we always use in such cases as this. There must be some mistake. Show me the bottle."

The nurse turned scarlet at the curt command. Then quietly she rose and fetched the bottle, now half empty.

"Let me take it." The doctor's face was now as scarlet as her own, the veins upon his brow were swollen and hard as knotted cords; but his hand was very steady, as he took the bottle, removed the cork, smelled, tasted. "Who has had access to this bottle?" he thundered then, and his voice boded little good to any meddler.

"Mr. Brenton and myself."

"Who else?"

"Nobody."

The veins about the temples began throbbing heavily. Brenton could see the skin about them tighten to the pulse-beat. Between them, the keen eyes gleamed like balls of polished metal surcharged with electricity.

"Think again, nurse," Doctor Keltridge said slowly. "And remember that your professional reputation is at stake. That bottle has been emptied and refilled with water. Where has that bottle been?"

"On the mantel."

"Who has been in the room?"

"Mr. Brenton, myself, and the baby."

"And Mrs. Brenton?" The doctor's eyes were fixed upon the nurse, as he put the question. He did not see the sudden whitening of Brenton's face; but his trained ear did make out the swift intake of Brenton's breath.

"She came and went."

"When you were here?"

"Yes."

"And you were here, you or Mr. Brenton, all night long?"

"Yes."

"And all the morning?"

"Except when I was telephoning to you."

"Hm!" This time, as casually as he was able, the doctor glanced at Brenton, and his glance caught Brenton stuffing a wadded handkerchief into his pocket. Above his forehead, his hair was damp and sticky. "You left the room, while you called me up? And, when you went away, the bottle was on the mantel? You are sure?"

"I am sure."

"Where was it, when you came back?"

"In the same place. I know that, for I went straight to it. You had just told me it would keep the child alive, until you came." Under the rapid fire of questions, the nurse's voice began to show defiance.

The doctor recognized the defiance, and lifted up his head.

"Steady, nurse," he cautioned her. "Don't get on your nerves now; there is too much at stake. Where were the others, while you were telephoning?"

"Mr. Brenton had gone downstairs to get his breakfast. Mrs. Brenton was dressing in her room."

"All the time?"

"I—I supposed so." The nurse turned to Brenton sharply. "You met her, Mr. Brenton, when she started down the stairs?" she asked him. "I am sure I heard you speaking to her, sure that I heard her answer."

Brenton wet his lips; then he passed his hand across his brow, palm outward. Both nurse and doctor could see the heavy streak of moisture gathered in the life-line.

"Forgive me, doctor," he said, after a minute. "I seem dazed by this thing; it has been a long and anxious night, and I am more upset than I had supposed. Mrs. Brenton? She has gone away to church; she felt that now, if ever, she needed the help and the prayers of her own people."

But the doctor was not to be put off with mere evasions. He pressed his question mercilessly, hating himself acutely, all the while.

"You saw her, as the nurse says, when she first came out of her room, this morning?"

"Yes." Brenton's voice had lost its resonance and sounded curiously listless, as he answered. "Yes, I saw her then, and urged her not to go."

The doctor's eyes veiled themselves abruptly, and he turned away. The nurse, watching, felt he was satisfied that no blunder had occurred within the house. Brenton, though, knew differently. Watching the doctor, he was well aware that, in the doctor's mind, there were no more doubts as to the person who had made the fatal substitution than as if, like Brenton's self, his keen old eyes had rested upon the telltale drops clinging to Katharine's front breadths.

The doctor's eyes had veiled themselves; Brenton had turned away and sunk down in a chair. An instant later, both the men had rallied to a swift attention. Katharine, alert, smiling a little and stepping lightly, carelessly, it seemed, was coming up the stairs.

Doctor Keltridge turned to the nurse.

"You must be very tired," he said, with a kindliness which yet held its own note of command. "Go now and eat a good breakfast, and then lie down. I shall be here, for the present." Then he faced back to Katharine, who stood upon the threshold.

"You here, doctor?" she said jauntily, as she came in. "I'm sure it's very good of you."

"Yes, Mrs. Brenton. I am here."

His accent took a little from the jauntiness of Katharine's bearing.

"Has anything happened?" she asked swiftly.

"Happened?" The doctor's voice was grim with unphrased reproach.

"How is my baby boy?" she asked again.

Her well-considered flutter of agitation angered the doctor utterly. His reply came like a blow from a bludgeon.

"Dead."

"Doctor! My baby boy! When? How?" And Katharine, really startled now, hurried across the floor to the corner where the frilly crib shielded the quiet sleeper from her gaze.

Half-way across the floor, she was brought to an abrupt halt. The doctor's hand was shut upon her arm in a clutch of iron; the doctor's eyes were blazing down at her in a rage such as Brenton, watching, had never before seen upon the face of human man.

"Stop!" he bade her curtly, yet in a voice too low to give the servants below stairs any hint of the strife going on above. "Your baby boy is sleeping in his Heavenly Father's arms. It is not for any one like you to try to waken him; not for you, unrepenting, to look into his face."

"Unrepenting! Doctor!" Katharine tried to shrink away from the accusing face and voice; but the iron hand held her firmly.

"Yes, unrepenting," the doctor repeated gravely and, as he spoke, he loosed his hold upon her arm. "Mrs. Brenton, you asked me how the baby died. There is your answer." And he pointed to the row of bottles on the shelf.

Instantly she rallied. Neither, whether to her shame or credit be it said, did she make any effort to deny his wordless charge.

"Well? Suppose I did?" she said, with sudden calmness. "It was my only chance to save my child."

"Katharine—"

"Wait, Brenton." The doctor spoke as gently as if he had been talking to a tired little child. "Please leave this thing to me; it may save you something, later on." Then his voice hardened. "You admit it, then?" he queried.

Without a glance at her husband, Katharine faced the doctor, her head held high, her eyes and cheeks blazing with anger.

"I am proud to do so," she said, and her voice was hard as steel. "It is my one chance to speak out in behalf of my faith."

"Your faith has murdered your child," the doctor told her harshly.

She answered him with equal harshness.

"The murder lies at your own door. Left alone, I would have saved him. Your drugs have weakened him; your unreasonable doubts have killed him utterly. Between the two of you, yourself and—him," and the little pause was venomous with unspoken hatred; "you have killed my baby boy. I did my best; I took the final chance. But I could not go to seek the help of my own church, and leave you, unguarded, to do your harm in your own way. I did the only thing left to me, when I emptied out your bottle and filled it with water. We are told that no healing can be accomplished, if drugs are being used at the same time."

"Who tells you?" the doctor queried stormily.

She stared at him disdainfully, before she answered,—

"The All-Mother of our Church." Then, still disdainfully, she turned to leave the room. "Scott, if you wish to speak to me, I shall be in my own room," she said.

And then, still smiling slightly, still a little bit disdainful, she went away and left the two men standing there alone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

"He isn't always such an ass," Dolph said, as he crossed his legs, preparatory to a long discussion. "It's only when he sets out to be bold and bad that he's so intolerable."

"Prather and the adjectives don't seem to match up very well," Reed objected.

"No. That is the whole trouble; he can't live up to his ambitions. The poor little beggar would like nothing better than to go the pace, as a sort of experimental lap for the instruction of his characters; but he always finds the pace too swift, and lags behind. As result, he isn't fast, but merely skittish. In the same way, he'd like to pose as a black-hearted villain. Instead, he gets to a point where he is just about as unsanctified as a Sunday edition of fruit salad."

"Sunday?"

"Yes, when they chuck in all the odds and ends of wine left from the dinners of the week. To the untrained tongue, it is a fearful pleasure to partake thereof. Prather makes up his iniquitous debauches after the same recipe: absorbing the yellow journals and the orange output of his fellow novelists, going down to New York for a week end, and then coming home to embody in a novel his consequent attack of biliousness."

"You've read his last one?"

Dolph nodded.

"And therefore I know whereof I speak," he added gloomily. "I wish the little beggar would leave off his moving picture shows of town society, and hie his muse once more in search of subjects from the woolly West."

"Knowing the West more than a little, I don't." Reed spoke with decision.

"What's the harm?"

"He doesn't get within a gunshot of the truth."

"No matter. He thinks he does, and the average member of his reading public doesn't know enough to realize the difference."

"All the worse. He ought to be sued for libel. By the way, did you know he has been having his professional eye on me?"

"For what?"

"Copy, of course. He got to calling rather often. I must say that I lured him on; I found his babble a distraction. Then, one day—Prather is nothing, if not transparent—he let out the fact that he was taking notes of me, for his next novel."

"Of all the—"

Reed interrupted.

"Not in my present ignominy, however; but as I must have been, he explained most considerately, in my prime. He must have had good confidence in his own imagination, though."

"Of course," Dolph said serenely. "He's always banked on that. I've heard him telling, after any number of different dinners, what a feat it was for him to write A Portia of the Rockies when, for a fact, he never had been farther west than Toledo. But what is he going to do with you?"

"Nothing. I called him off."

Dolph nodded at the ankle he was nursing in both hands.

"Grand work, that!" he said. "It would be about as easy as calling off a flea that was starting on a cross-country journey to the nearest dog. How did you manage?"

Reed's brown eyes laughed; but his voice was grave.

"I invoked Ramsdell, and he did the deed. From all accounts, he did it thoroughly, for Prather hasn't put his nose inside my room, since the day that Ramsdell escorted him downstairs."

"I say!" Dolph looked up suddenly. "I've a patch to put over that hole. About three weeks ago? Yes? Well, at Olive Keltridge's last dinner, Prather came edging up to me. I saw he had things on his mind, and I wasn't busy, so I let him get them off. Else, I was afraid he'd strangle with the unaccustomed load."

"And the things were me?" Reed inquired urbanely.

"Yes. He asked me if I had heard that you were growing very nervous lately. That you—Well, never mind the rest of it. In the time of it, though, I supposed that it was his novelist's imagination that had got to work. Now I know it was only another manifestation of the almighty Ramsdell."

"He is almighty, Dolph. I'd be badly off without him."

"So I observe." Dolph chuckled. "At first, I was as afraid of him as if he had been a country undertaker looking for a job; but I'm slowly coming to the belief that the fellow is an actual wag. Really, you'd be badly off without him. He'll stay on, of course?"

"As long as I can keep him. He informs me daily that he'll see me through it till I die. From all indications, though, I'm a good deal more afraid of his dying, first."

"Rot!" Dolph remarked cheerily. "What you need, Opdyke, is to forego thoughts of dying, and get busy."

"What about?" Reed asked a little bitterly. "My present environment isn't particularly fitted for the strenuous life."

Dolph shut his two hands, side by side, around his ankle. When he spoke, though, his voice was unconcerned.

"Not unless you take your profession into bed with you," he remarked.

From behind Opdyke's courteous smile for a rather dull joke, there gathered interest, comprehension, eagerness.

"Dennison, you mean something or other, out of that," he said, after a little pause.

Dolph shot him one swift glance of scrutiny.

"Naturally. As a rule, I don't talk at random," he said then.

"What do you mean, exactly?" Reed sought to put the question steadily, but his voice throbbed with excitement.

Satisfied with the start that he had made, Dolph let go his ankle and sank back inertly in his chair.

"What idiots you specialist fellows are!" he observed indolently. "Once you get smacked on the head, you're all in. You think you are killed, and, instead of kicking around to find out the truth of the matter, you promptly proceed to turn up your toes."

Reed eyed him keenly, spoke impatiently.

"Interpret, Dolph. I may be dense; but I can't see what it is you're driving at."

"More fool you! I thought better of you, Opdyke, than all that," Dolph told him, with unabated serenity. "Didn't you ever hear of such a thing as a consulting engineer?"

"I ought, as it was my official title," Reed made curt answer. "What then?"

"Put your title into commission, man."

"Impossible."

"Not at all. Of course, you can't go raging around the mountains; but you may have heard of an old gentleman named Mahomet. Yes? Well, there you are. And you've a laboratory and a staff of chemists under your very elbow. Make your people come to you, instead of your going to them. Your reputation is all made by now. Sit back and get the working good out of it, not chuck it away as if it wasn't worth an uninitialled Lincoln cent."

Nothing more nonchalant and unconcerned than Dolph's drawling utterance could have been imagined. None the less, his words appeared to have kindled into new flame the burnt-out fires of Opdyke's professional ambition. For a minute or two, he lay quite silent, while two scarlet patches glowed upon his cheeks, and while the eyes above them seemed to fix themselves on distant vistas far beyond the limits of Dolph's sight. Then at last, he spoke, whimsically as far as his mere wording went, but in a voice which Dolph found scarcely recognizable.

"Dennison," he said slowly; "for a man who aims to be considered a genius by reason of the chronic mismatching of his socks and ties, and by his discordant metaphors, you once in a while do have an inspiration. Thanks. And now, would you mind it, if I asked you to go home? I believe I'd like a little time to think things over. Come in, to-morrow morning, though. Else, I shall send Ramsdell out to capture you."

Next day, Dolph did come in, and again the next. On the third day, Opdyke had a half-dozen letters to show him, a half-dozen bits of planning to submit to his shrewd young brain.

"I've rather got to count on you in this thing, Dennison," he said concisely. "My father is an older man, and the past two years have been hard on him; he's not so aggressive as he was, not half so optimistic. Doctor Keltridge will be watching me to see that I'm not overdoing. He means well; but now and then it's healthy to overdo matters a little. Brenton has all he can handle, with his wife. Therefore, in view of Ramsdell's scholarly attainments, and until I'm justified in setting up a professional assistant, I rather fancy that it's up to you."

"Thanks. I'm there, every time," Dolph told him crisply. "Besides, after yesterday, I'd walk on my ears for you."

"You might give a sample exhibition now. Have you said anything, yet?"

"No chance. Besides, I rather hated—Hang it all, Reed, I don't want to be in a hurry about shuffling off in your best shoes!"

Reed's eyes lost a little of their eagerness; but his smile was unfaltering.

"They never were my shoes, Dolph. Even if they had been, I couldn't wear them now; that has all gone by. And, if they had been mine, and I had had to pass them on to some one else, there is no one in the world I'd see walking off in them so contentedly as I would see you. Fact, man, so take it as it comes, and enter into your own kingdom."

"If it is mine," Dolph said gravely.

"I think it is. It is for you to find out, though. But remember this: you are not to feel for one instant that you're dispossessing any rightful heir. The chance is yours, Dolph. Most likely it never would have been mine, in any case. Now it is totally impossible."

Dolph attempted one last remonstrance.

"But why?" he asked vehemently.

The smile faded from Reed's lips, and the lines around the lips grew grim.

"Because," he answered tersely; "my common sense is in working order, even if my legs are not."

And, with this downright assurance ringing in his ears and with the tragedy of its brave renunciation crowding out somewhat of his own hopefulness, Dolph Dennison went away in search of Olive Keltridge.

Olive, however, was gone to a luncheon out of town, so Dolph was told by the maid who answered to his ringing. Therefore he went his way once more; and, feeling idle, unsettled, alternately depressed at the prospect of what he deemed his coming selfishness in seeking Olive again later on, and elated with a general zeal for altruistic effort by the success of his attempt to arouse Opdyke's dormant ambition: because of all these things, he suddenly decided that it would be the part of good fellowship to pay a visit to his former rector and present colleague, Brenton.

To be sure, Dolph had never had the habit of calling upon Brenton. From the first, his liking for the man had been a temperate one, a liking mitigated by his own regrets concerning the nature of Brenton's sense of humour. Moreover, he shied a little bit at Brenton's priestly calling, shied a little bit more at the idea of coming into closer quarters with Brenton's wife. Now, from all accounts, the wife was somewhat in abeyance; and the sudden reversal of Brenton's collar buttons had turned him from the picture of a priest to at least the semblance of a man.

In regard to Brenton, Dolph Dennison saw no need to mince matters. His clear young eyes had made out the one loose thread that sagged and knotted across and across the texture of Brenton's mind. He saw it and, lacking knowledge of its source in Brenton's erratic father, he condemned it with the cocksure harshness of exceeding youth. Without it, Brenton would have been all man. With it, Dolph believed, he was predestined to futility. Indeed, what hope was there for a man who would get himself all waxy over such played-out doctrines as predestination, and then sit by, impotently calm, and watch his wife go off upon the Christian Science tangent, without a word to stop her and tie her down to reason? It was like finding cold, bare bones embedded in one's breakfast porridge. None the less, one did owe some social decencies to one's colleagues of the faculty. Therefore, despite his new-formed porridge metaphor, Dolph trudged away in the direction of the Brentons' home.

The new home was a smaller one than Saint Peter's rectory. It stood back a little from the street, under a trio of giant hemlocks which shaded the front verandah and the long stretch of gravelled walk. The shady walk was damp now, with the moisture of the early spring, and the wet little stones ground only softly underneath Dolph's heels, so softly that their murmur was quite inaudible inside the house, although a window, wide open to the front verandah, gave to Dolph, as he crossed the lawn, a full knowledge of the discussion going on within. It was a one-sided sort of a discussion, to all appearing. Moreover, from the pitch and the velocity of the voice, Dolph judged the discussion to be largely on the part of the Brentons' most recent cook.

"There's no use in my trying to please you," he heard the voice say, as he started up the strip of gravel. "You find fault with everything I do; you interfere with my rights—"

There came the low murmur of another voice. Then,—

"Rights? My rights to rule my life according to my own beliefs. My rights to seek the Universal Truth. I have my way to go, as you say you have yours. The two ways can never be the same. I have tried my best to make them so; but it is no use."

Again the murmur.

"And my best to live up to my share of a bad bargain," came the brutal answer. "My best to—" The voice choked with its own emotions.

"Tut! Tut!" Dolph remarked softly, at the invisible owner of the voice. "Steady, now; or you'll be crying, next thing you know."

His warning, though, was needless. No trace of tears came into the militant reply to the next low words.

"Yes, a bad, bad bargain. When we came together, I dreamed of a perfect union, a life of mutual opportunity. Oh, yes, I know. You say it's all on account of my beliefs, all because I have strayed away from the chalkline you marked out for me. But who else has strayed? Who else has thrown over his earlier creed? And you have thrown with it all belief in anything, tossed it aside as if it had been a worn-out rag. I have laid it aside, unharmed, and chosen out another creed of finer texture. And now you think I am going to stay here, inert, supine, and watch you tear that creed apart. Never!"

"Grand language, that," Dolph soliloquized, as he mounted the steps and came into hearing of the words. "Evidently, it's not the cook; she wouldn't be up to that level."

"Your fault? Whose fault, else? Who first took pains to teach me that the old creed of our parents was unbelievable? Who put the first questionings into my young mind? Who waked me from my mental sleep? It was you, yourself. Without you, I never should have known the peace which now I feel. For so much, I am grateful to you, Scott Brenton."

On the final sentences, the angry voice had lowered its pitch a little, as if to come into some slight consonance with the peace of which it boasted. The different cadence, coupled with the unexpected use of Brenton's given name, brought light to Dolph Dennison.

"Damn!" he remarked succinctly, letting go the knocker with which he had been hoping to put an end to the discussion. "It's Mrs. Brenton!"

And then, obedient to the town-wide impulse which never failed to come in times of trouble, Dolph bolted down the Brenton doorsteps on his tiptoes, and dashed away in search of Doctor Keltridge.

The pause which followed his departure, as a matter of course, had no connection with it. Rather, it was of two-fold purpose. Katharine needed time to catch her breath; Brenton needed time to rally his mind to meet the sudden strain. In the end, it was Brenton who spoke.

"Then, Katharine, what is it your plan to do?"

"My plan!" her voice bespoke her scorn. "At least, then, you are beginning to consider me a little."

"I always have meant to consider you, Katharine."

"When? In what way?" But she waited for no answer, except the one which she herself was ready to give. "None. You lived your life. You went your way. You gave me the crumbs of your time, of your mind. My share in your life came out of what your other friends left over. Did you consult me, when you turned into an Episcopalian? No! Did you consult me, when you threw it all aside, all your pretty broken toy that, once on a time, you had called religion, and went to teaching chemistry to a pack of girls? No! A thousand times, no! You made your life the way you wanted it. You say it was your right to do so. Then, in the same way, I claim it is my right, in searching for the truth, to make my life over into anything I choose."

"But, if your choice is not a wise one?"

She turned upon him fiercely.

"Who are you to judge? And is your own choice so wise? Your own choices, rather, for, if I remember clearly, there have been a number of them. And what good have they done to any man?"

"Too little good, Katharine," Brenton assented humbly. "At least, though, they have done no harm."

"How do you know that?" she taunted him defiantly. "How is any man to know the harm he can do by a wrong belief? No; I don't mean the harm you may have done to yourself. That is superficial. You can cure it easily; there are dozens of mental plasters that you can apply." Her voice grew yet more scornful on the phrase. "But what about the harm to other people? What about the harm to me from all your theological shilly-shally? The only wonder of it all is that I was given the strength to come out of it and into something better. And now—"

Brenton stayed her torrent of words by the very quiet of his brief question.

"Now, Katharine?"

"Now I demand my right to go out and make what I can of the little you have left me of my life."

"In what way?"

His quiet interrogations pierced her excitement as no opposition could have done. Her next reply, when it came, was almost devoid of passion.

"I wish to study. I must have my time for that, not fritter it away on managing servants and going to faculty dinners."

"To study what?"

Again she flung up her head, and her eyes glittered. Her voice, though, was now under perfect control.

"To study my religion, to learn to know it through and through."

"I thought you knew it now."

She looked at him as from a measureless height of wisdom and experience.

"Does one ever know the Infinite? Our belief can not be packed into a neat bundle and tied up in the Apostles Creed. It is deeper than that, and far, far wider. And then," and, to Brenton's astonishment, her face lighted with a smile which was curiously akin to one of happy peace; "and, in time, I shall do my best to prepare myself to be a Healer."

"Katharine!" Despite the peaceful smile which had heralded the announcement, Brenton felt his whole nature recoiling from the thought.

"Why not?" she asked him swiftly. "You mean I am not worthy? Of course not—yet. In time, though, it will come; in time, I shall be free from thoughts such as have dragged me down into to-day's discussion. Not, though, while I live with you as you are now. Not while I have the daily friction of your unbelief and opposition. While these confront me, I am tied down to the lower level; the hour has come when I know it is my higher duty to go free. For that reason, I have told you this, to-day. One has to make practical plans, even if it is to carry out spiritual endeavours. There are things to arrange, before I go."

There came a little silence. Then,—

"You are really going?" Brenton asked.

"I am."

"When?"

"I promised to be in Boston, early in the week."

Again there came the silence. This time, it lasted until, with an ostentatiously natural step, Katharine turned away and left the room. Then, for an instant, Brenton stood staring after her. An instant later, he had dropped down at his desk and buried his face within the circle of his clasped arms, covering his ears to shut out the echo of his wife's accusing words. He tried to drive off from his mind the ugly question how far he himself had been blamable for this thing; how far he might have steadied Katharine by forcing her to go with him into all the secrets of his life. Instead, he tried to fix his mind upon the approaching ruin of his home; but he only could succeed in thinking about the passing of his baby boy, about the way the weazen little arms had shot upward, waving in joyous and insistent recognition. After all their tedious, aching search for truth, Katharine's search and his, had it been given to that little child to find out and acknowledge the eternal verities, hidden for ever from their older eyes?

And, meanwhile, his world was waxing empty. First his beliefs had gone; and then his baby boy, his hope; and now, last of all, was to go his wife who should have been his final trust. The past was finished. Ahead of him was nothing but a lonely road which led nowhere and ended in nothing. Of what use for a tired man like himself to force himself up and on along it? Of what use to deny his share of domestic blame, merely because his intentions had been of the most unselfish? His head sank lower in his clasping arms.

It was so that Doctor Keltridge found him when, an hour later, he came marching in at the unlatched front door.

CHAPTER THIRTY

"The thing is amounting to an obsession," Doctor Keltridge told Professor Opdyke testily, two months later. "I never saw a case of such ineradicable dubiousness concerning all the things that do not count."

"But the fellow is sincere," the professor urged in extenuation.

"Yes; that makes it all so much the worse, as we doctors are aware. It's a species of disease, Opdyke, and when a patient takes his disease seriously, as a general rule it's all up with him. Just how far has Brenton gone?"

"From our standpoint, not very far; from the standpoint of the student mind, to the outer limits of agnosticism."

The doctor whistled thoughtfully.

"What a damn-fool he is, Opdyke!" he remarked, with stress upon the hyphen.

"Yes, and no. If I were going to analyze him, I'd write his formula as B{_3}M+ECo{_7}, thrice brilliant man plus—and, mind you, the plus is a serious handicap—an embodied conscience raised to the seventh power. Brenton is brilliant; but his mind works in a series of swift flashes, and the flashes dazzle him till they spoil all of his perspective. Instead of taking them for what they are, mere sparks flying from the ends of broken mental contact, he thinks that they are errant gleams of universal truth, vouchsafed to him alone. Then his seven-horse-power conscience goes to work, and bids him scatter the gleams across a darkening world. If he didn't mean so very well, he would do infinitely better. However, he—"

"Is Brenton," the doctor interposed quietly. "What is more, he will be Brenton till the end of time. He even may get worse, by way of natural reaction from the strain he was under with his wife. He steadied to that better than I hoped, steadied to the baby's death, and steadied to the reproaches she considerately heaped on him for her parting gift."

"Reproaches?"

"Yes. She told him that he was to blame for the whole situation; that, if he hadn't run amok, she would be jogging contentedly along the path of ancestral Calvinism. Moreover, the fact that there is more than a grain of truth in her contention doesn't lessen the sting that it has left behind. Now, as a natural consequence, the strain over, he is letting go entirely. He is made like that. Unless we want him to go to pieces utterly, we shall either have to invoke the aid of circumstance, or else bring him up with a round turn, ourselves."

"How?" the professor queried flatly. "A man in his position is not amenable to discipline."

"I'm not so sure of that." The doctor chuckled. "I am a trustee, you know."

"Then he'll resign."

"Not a bit of it. He may threaten it, may talk grand and elevated nonsense concerning freedom of speech and all the rest of it. When it comes to resignation, though, he will draw in his horns. His life is in that laboratory of yours."

"And in his students?"

"No. There's the trouble. It's the idea itself he's after, not its growing grip upon the world at large."

"Then what makes him——" The professor paused for the fitting word.

The doctor supplied it, and remorselessly.

"Explatterate? Because it's a part of him to talk forth his imaginings, and, just at the present hour, he lacks all proper outlet but his class. Something has gone bad inside the man; no wonder, though, when one thinks of all that he has gone through. Even you, Opdyke, will never know the worst of that. Still, we shall have to put some sort of brake upon him; he can't go on like this."

For a little while, the professor smoked in silence.

"Can't you warn him unofficially, Keltridge?" he asked then.

"That he is disgracing the department?"

"No. That he is wrecking his final chance to amount to anything that's practical? That, if he holds on here, he must keep within some sort of limits in the things he says? That, if he lets go this present opportunity, he'll turn into the worst of all things, a mental derelict?"

The doctor groaned at the suggestion.

"Opdyke, I'll be hanged if I'll put in all my time, playing intellectual wet-nurse to Scott Brenton! I've served my turn. If ever he began to cut his wisdom teeth, it's time he was about it."

The professor took up the metaphor and cast it back upon the doctor.

"A good many babies die of teething," he said. "I've heard you say, yourself, that it was the one time in all a man's life when he was most dependent on the ministrations of the doctor."

The doctor rose and straightened up his shoulders.

"Fairly caught," he confessed. "Well, I'll do my best. Meanwhile, how is Reed?"

"Too busy to think much about himself."

"Not overworking?" the doctor questioned sharply.

"No. At least, not if his mental condition is any index to his physical. He is eager as a boy over the way his work is coming in. Did I tell you he has an assistant coming, day after to-morrow? Poor little Dennison has been swamped, for two weeks, in the rising tide of things that he knew nothing at all about. I must say he's been heroic in his efforts to help Reed out."

The doctor nodded.

"Dolph is a good sort. In the last analysis, he is not unlike Reed; they have the same staying power, the same trick of hating to take themselves in earnest. Still, for Reed's sake as well as Dolph's, I'm glad a trained assistant is coming. In fact, I might say I am glad on my own account."

"You?"

The doctor laughed.

"Yes. I've had Dolph at all hours, tearing his hair in my laboratory, while I tried to coach him. I do think, for a boy brought up on belles-lettres, he's made a decent showing as assistant mineralogist. I like Dolph. He's an all-round good fellow."

The professor laid aside his pipe; then he looked up keenly.

"He's at your house often?" he inquired.

The doctor read his old friend like a large-print page. Reading, he straightway became impenetrable.

"Yes. He drops in rather often," he assented. "Of course, he knows I am a good deal interested in Reed's new venture. Wonderful, isn't it, the way it has turned out so well? If only Brenton had one quarter of his steady grip!"

But, for the present, steady grip was the one thing Brenton lacked. Indeed, watching the recent chaos of his domestic life, one could scarcely wonder. As the doctor had said, reaction was bound to come. It had been no small upsetting, too, the saying farewell to his association with Saint Peter's Parish. The sudden reversal of his collar buttons was, in a sense, typical of the sudden reversal of all his habits of thought and life. His grip had been loosening, during many previous months; the sudden change in his responsibilities appeared to have relaxed it utterly.

In the broadest sense, Brenton's old work, like his new, had been teaching. Now, however, the enthusiasm of his gospel was possessing him completely, a gospel, nowadays, solely of the science which, heretofore, threading through and through the fabric of his sermons, had of necessity been juggled to the likeness of the Book of Revelation. Now that he could set it forth in all its nakedness, it seemed to Brenton more than ever like the Book of Revelation. Day after day, his enthusiasm for his theme increased its pace, threw off the bridle of hard, concrete fact, ran to the speculative limits of its course, and then ran past them. By the first of May, Brenton's lectures had made themselves one of the features of the college world; but, by the same token, they had ceased to be lectures upon chemistry, and had become harangues upon every phase of the allied sciences, harangues which ran through the entire gamut of abstract investigation, and came to rest at last upon the pair of finite questions: Whence? and Whither?

And, by the first of May, the student world was all agog, seeking to answer those questions flatly and quite off-hand, instead of waiting for experience of life to give the answer for them. Brenton, meantime, was becoming ten times the force he had been at Saint Peter's; the only trouble lay in the fact that now his force was, not formative, but deformative.

"He's making himself a reputation, fast enough," Dolph Dennison said, one day. "How much good he is accomplishing, though, is another question."

To Dolph's surprise, Olive opposed him.

"Isn't there always good in simple, downright sincerity?" she queried.

"Not a bit of it," Dolph assured her bluntly, for a certain talk between them, weeks before, a talk disastrous to the best of Dolph's plans for life, had in no sense put an end to their good friendship. "Sincerity itself is nothing. It's the thing one gets sincere about." Then, without waiting for an answer, "What a woman you are, Olive!" he said.

"Because I stand up for Mr. Brenton?"

"Because, down in your secret heart, you rather admire him for his confounded weaknesses." Dolph spoke with increasing bluntness.

"Not for his weaknesses, Dolph. The man is plucky and sincere. For the sake of the things that he believes are true, he will give up, has given up, more than most of us will ever gain."

Dolph plunged his fists into his pockets.

"Hang it all, Olive! Do be concrete," he bade her.

"I will, if I can," she said fearlessly. "It's only that the things themselves aren't too concrete."

"No." Dolph spoke incisively. "I should say they aren't. Olive look here. Don't get your values muddled, at this stage of the game."

Despite their friendship, she looked up at him haughtily.

"What do you mean, Dolph?"

For a minute, he stared down at her, smiling slightly and with a look in his eyes that nullified the frank brutality of his next words.

"Don't get mawkish over Brenton, Olive, just because he is a pitiful weakling who, in spite of all his good intentions, has made a consistent mess of everything he's tried to do. Because a man is weak, he isn't necessarily more lovable. Because he has an incurable disease, he isn't, of necessity, any more a subject for idolatry. No; I don't mean that to lap over on to Opdyke, either. If ever a man was healthy, Opdyke is that man. But Brenton isn't. His logic and his conscience both are full of bacteria, bad little bacteria that swim around and mess things. He may pull out of it, of course, and make something in the end. Then, you can set him up on a pedestal and stick flowers in his fair hair. For the present, though, do keep sane about him, and deplore him, not admire."

"Aren't you a little hard on him, Dolph?" Olive asked steadily, although her cheeks were burning with the truth of his implied accusal.

"No; I'm not."

There came a short pause. Then,—

"I am very sorry for him," Olive said a little obstinately.

"Be sorry, then. Be just as sorry as you can. But, for heaven's sake, don't tell him so," Dolph retorted rather mercilessly. "If he's ever going to amount to anything, he must be brought up with a round turn, not coddled and treated as a victim of untoward circumstance. If he behaves like this over a growing pain in his theology, what do you suppose he'd do in Opdyke's place?"

Olive struggled to regain her hauteur.

"The cases aren't parallel, Dolph," she said. "One is a physical matter; the other concerns the spirit."

Once again Dolph paused and looked down at her intently. Then,—

"Which is which?" he queried. "No; don't get testy, Olive. I'm not producing any brief for Opdyke. In fact, he doesn't need one; we both of us know already what he stands for. But I do hate to see a girl like you go off her head about such a man as Brenton, a man with a Christian Science wife and a thrilling voice and speaking eyes: all deadly assets for a misunderstood ex-preacher. No; I do not like Brenton. He's not my sort. Neither, for the fact of it, is he your sort."

Olive compressed her lips.

"I may help to make him so," she said.

"Best let him make himself; he's had too many formative fingers in his pie, already. Besides," Dolph's lips curled into an irrepressible smile; "how do you know it would be for his advantage?"

For one instant, Olive struggled with her pique. Then she cast it off, and looked up at Dolph with her old smile.

"You hit hard, Dolph," she told him; "but I'm not sure you aren't in the right of it, after all. I like Mr. Brenton. I am sorry for him; perhaps it has muddled my values, as you call it, to be on the inside circle of his advisers. Still, there is something to be said upon the other side. You can't comprehend a man like Mr. Brenton, if you try."

"Why not? Not that I've tried over much, though," Dolph added, in hasty confession.

"It wouldn't have done you any good, if you had tried," Olive assured him flatly. "You haven't a single point in common. By ancestry and training, you're as unlike as a Zulu and an Eskimo. You began at about the point where Mr. Brenton, if he's lucky, will leave off. Your great-great-grandparents settled once for all the questions that he's agonizing over now. Naturally, you don't remember their struggles, and so you can't see why his should take it out of him, any more than you can see why a personable man like him ever could have married—"

"What your father aptly terms the She-Gargoyle?" Dolph inquired. "No; I can't. But then the question arises promptly, how can you?"

Olive smiled a little sadly. Loath though she was to acknowledge it to Dolph, of late she had been finding out that comprehension does not always make for full approval.

"As you say, Dolph," she told him; "it's the woman of me. After our own fashion, we every one of us are natural nurses; we know when our menfolk are in pain."

"Not always, Olive." Dolph spoke sadly.

"Yes, Dolph, we do. Hard as it is, though, sometimes we have to admit we have no cure for that especial pain. Still, you can be quite sure that it isn't easy for us to turn away and leave it, unhealed and aching." Then she threw off the little allegory, and once more spoke with spirit. "Dolph, we're created in mental couples, I suspect. Much as I care for Reed, it was you who had the insight to plan how he could make his life over into something besides the bare existence we all were dreading. In the same way, I may be the one to take in the tragedy of Mr. Brenton's indeterminate existence, and make it just a little lighter, if only by my understanding. Anyway, I mean to try."

She turned in across the lawn, leaving Dolph to stare after her retreating figure with no small anxiety.

"Blast the understanding!" he said profanely. "And then, blast the preacher!"

The poor preacher, however, for preacher still he was, in spite of the reversal of his collar fastenings, was feeling himself already blasted. He had been spending a long hour in the doctor's laboratory; and the doctor, for the once, had turned his back upon his pans and trays of cultures, and lavished his entire attention on his visitor.

"It's just here, Brenton," he said quietly, after an hour of argument; "you can do one of two things: you can keep to your text and teach those girls straight chemistry; or—"

Brenton faced him squarely, squarely capped the sentence with a single word.

"Resign."

"Yes."

"You mean you think I am a failure in my teaching?"

"No. Your teaching is all right. You are a born chemist and a born teacher. It's your infernal preaching I object to," the doctor told him unexpectedly.

"My preaching?"

"Yes. You employ your pulpit methods in your classes. You take a chemical text, and then turn and twist it into any sort of a metaphysical conclusion that appeals to you at the minute. No; wait! I am talking. Science is not equivocal, Brenton. It's as downright and determinate as A+B. It's what we know; not what we think we ought to think about the things we know. And it's science you are there to teach, not glittering abstractions having to do with man's latter end. The fact is, you've spent so long in trying to subject your theology to scientific proof that, now you're surfeited with science, you are trying to use it as a feeder to your theologic fires."

"Not consciously," Brenton objected, as a flush crept up across his cheeks. "I have meant—"

The doctor interrupted, but not unkindly.

"Consciously or unconsciously, it's all one, Brenton, as concerns the output. You must bridle your scientific imagination and your tongue, or else you'll have the whole college by the ears. For the present, you are letting off harmless rockets. Before you know it, though, you'll be dynamiting the whole establishment. Best go slow."

Brenton attempted one last stand.

"Have I any right to go slow, doctor, when there's a principle involved? Have I any right to suppress eternal truths—"

Then the doctor lost his temper.

"Eternal pollywogs!" he burst out. "Man, you're daft. Who told you what truths are eternal? Who told you where science ends, and where theology begins? Who told you what we mean, when we say provable? For two thousand years, and then some more, we have been slowly sifting down a whole mass of ill-assorted beliefs into two great facts: Creator and created. For practical purposes, isn't that all we need to know? Isn't it all that we any of us can grasp: the surety that the Creative Mind would never have taken the trouble to fashion us, in the first place if he hadn't put inside us all the needful germs of progress, all the needful intellect to grasp the evident duty that lies just ahead? What else, then, do you need? No. Don't try to talk about it. Just go out and take a good, long walk in the fresh air, and forget your latter end in the more important concerns of deep breathing. You are getting disgustingly round-shouldered. Good bye. And, by the way, I'll tell Olive you will be back here to dinner."

But Brenton, going on his way, was totally oblivious to the doctor's sage counsel as to the merits of deep breathing. Neither did he realize in the least the splendid optimism of the stern old doctor's creed. For the hour, optimism was quite beyond his ken. He only realized that his own world had gone bad; that failure awaited him at every turn, not a downright and practical failure, either, but a nebulous and indeterminate futility. His life had been nothing but one restless struggle to arrive at something finite, something which should satisfy alike his heart and reason. Instead of gaining the one thing, it seemed to him that all had been lost. His present existence was as focusless as an eye after its lens has been extracted. His past had been opaque, his future would be permanently blurred. And for what good had been all the pain? It would have been far better, far more sane, if he had clung stoutly to the flaming horns of his hereditary Calvinism. Infinitely better to feel their scorching touch than to drift into a state of apathy past any feeling! And Brenton wondered vaguely whether he ever would feel anything again, anything, that is, as a personal issue, rather than as a scrap of the great world-plan. Most things, nowadays, left him conscious of being aloof, remote. Even the going away of his wife. Even the death of—He pulled himself up short. Not the baby's death. That was still personal, still very personal; personal was the message of those little waving hands. What did the baby see? Something denied for ever to his adult and doubting eyes?

Forgetful of the doctor's invitation to come back to dine, Brenton at twilight found himself upon the long white bridge, his elbows on the rail, his eyes upon the darkening surface of the river, as it swept down upon him from out the purpling hills. As of old, its mystery held him, the mystery of its ceaseless coming, the mystery of its ceaseless going on and on, until it lost all individual existence in the soundless, boundless sea. To-night, in the apathy which held his senses in subjection, he watched it through the dying twilight, until it ceased to be to him a river, but appeared to him as an embodiment of life itself, coming, coming, coming down to him out of the purpling distance, going, going, going down away from him into the deepening shadows. And then the light died, and darkness crept across it all, and then—extinction.

Next morning, he arranged it with Professor Opdyke that, for the present, the other assistant should take over all of his lectures, while he himself would put in his time inside the laboratory.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Dolph, being Dolph, spoke out his fears to Opdyke. Dolph, being a rhetorician, approached his subject cornerwise, however.

"I wish to heaven you'd fall in love with Olive, Opdyke," he said moodily, next day.

Reed, looking up from the chaos of letters that were littering his couch, gave a short laugh.

"So that I could properly present my sympathy to you?" he queried, as a faint colour stole up across his cheeks.

Dolph dropped his rhetoric, and went bluntly to the point.

"No; so that you could obliterate Brenton's image from her mind."

"What do you mean, Dennison?" Reed spoke sternly.

Dolph threw himself back in his chair and answered at the ceiling.

"I am not sure I mean anything at all. Olive has sense enough for a dozen, and Brenton is a married man, with a vampire for a wife."

Reed cut in with a question, which showed plainly to Dolph how little he cared to discuss Dolph's fears concerning Olive.

"Does anybody hear anything from the wife?"

"I don't, thank heaven!" Dolph assured him piously. "I did hear my sister-in-law explaining to a visitor that Mrs. Brenton was very busy in Boston. How she knew it; or whether she made it up for conversational purposes, I don't know. Neither do I know how long it takes to get one's self into commission as a healer. Doesn't Brenton ever say anything about her?"

"Not to me. Of course, it's not a subject where I like to be asking questions; and I suppose, for the same reason, he hates to open it up, himself."

"Naturally." Dolph's tone was dry. "Reed, who killed that baby?"

Opdyke raised his brows.

"I'm not the medical examiner, Dennison; I'm not obliged to say what I think about it," he returned.

Dolph sat up and faced his friend.

"I am, then. Opdyke, if it hadn't been a case of his own rector's family, Doctor Keltridge would have carried the matter to the courts."

"Did Olive tell you?"

"Olive doesn't tell things of that sort," Dolph said conclusively. "She's her father's own child." Then, of a sudden, he returned to his original charge. "Opdyke, why don't you think a little more about Olive Keltridge?" he demanded.

"Because I think quite enough of her, as it is," Reed answered.

"Of her, but not about her," Dolph said moodily. "Of course, if I could get her for my own wife, I wouldn't be giving you this advice. I've proved I can't, though—"

Reed interrupted.

"Girls have been known to change their minds," he said.

In spite of his sentimental regrets, Dolph laughed outright.

"If you had been present at our interview, you wouldn't have predicted any change in this case. Olive was—well, just as she always is, the soul of downright niceness; but she managed to leave me quite convinced once and for all that I might as well have wooed the woman in the moon. And, by Jove," Dolph's voice dropped to a confidential murmur; "now it's all over, I begin to think that she was right. It was a nasty half-hour for both of us; but we've come out of it, ripping good friends and without a sentimental regret to our names."

"Speaks well for Olive."

"Doesn't it? It's left me caring for her a long way more than ever, only not in the accepted-suitor sort of fashion. That's the reason I hate to see her drifting about, all at loose ends."

"Dennison," Reed spoke with masterful abruptness; "would you mind doing a letter or two at my dictation? Duncan is busy in the laboratory, this afternoon; and these things must go out on to-night's mail." His voice was steady, as he spoke; but in his brave brown eyes Dolph recognized the old-time harried, hunted look which he had hoped would never come again. Later, the letters done, Dolph went away without waiting for more conversation. For a singularly happy-go-lucky mortal, Dolph's instincts were to be by no means distrusted.

Dolph's going was only just in time to prevent his meeting Olive who came around the curve of the street, just as he was leaving the Opdyke grounds. He waved his hat to her from afar, and she answered his greeting; but neither of them changed the direction of his steps. They saw each other often enough, in any case; and it was an accepted fact between them that Reed's calls were better taken singly, as a rule, than in pairs.

However, as she went into Reed's room, that day, Olive began to have her doubts how long the old rule would hold good. Reed was increasingly busy, nowadays. Letters and drawings, photographs and samples of ores were piling in upon him from all parts of the country. The old phrase, indeed, was gaining a new fulfilment: the mountain was coming to Mahomet in all literalness. Olive had long since become accustomed to finding the room littered with the débris of much consulting, had grown accustomed to having her trivial gossip interrupted by the advent of fresh letters and a new supply of specimen ores. She had grown glib in reading off the unfamiliar phrasing of the letters, facile in writing down the totally unspellable words of Opdyke's dictated replies. In all of this, however, she had been made to feel aware that she herself stood first to Reed, his work stood second.

Not that Olive for one instant would have allowed herself consciously to become jealous of Reed's work. She was too sane and generous for that, too happy in the change it was making in Reed's existence. He was alert and enthusiastic now, where aforetime he was passive and plucky. His brown eyes snapped, not gleamed expressively. In short, the new assistant was finding out, to his extreme surprise, that his position was no sentimental sinecure, that, coming to be hands and feet to supplement an active scientific brain, he was likely to work more strenuously, more to the purpose, than he had done in the New York office of the brilliant specialist who had sent him up to Reed.

It was several weeks now since Dolph had made his crisp suggestion that Reed take his profession into bed with him. Even in that little time, the change was measureless; to all practical intents and purposes, the dying had come into a new life. The life, too, was by no means wholly intellectual. As Reed's professional enthusiasm grew stronger, his bodily gain apparently kept pace with it. To be sure, the lower half of him was totally, irrevocably dead. Nevertheless, by sheer, energetic will, Opdyke was making the upper half of his body do duty for the whole, was gaining a control over his crippled lower limbs that, six months before, he would have pronounced impossible.

With Ramsdell to pull and pry him to position, nowadays, he sat leaning up against the pillows on his bed, for an hour or two of every morning. The effort brought the beads of sweat out upon his forehead; but he took that a good deal as a matter of course, talked bravely of a rolling chair and a lift built on the corner of the house and even, a little later on, of a motor car and of a down-town office. Best of all, the old haunted look had left his eyes for ever. At least, so Olive had believed, until that day. To-day, despite his smile of greeting, the old expression was peering out at her, and she felt her hopes chilling within her at the sight.

"What is it, Reed?" she asked him, after a few minutes of trivial conversation. "Something has gone wrong."

"Not with me," he told her quickly. "In fact, things are very right. Ask Ramsdell."

"But you look—"

"How?" His laugh awaited her final word.

"Worried," she told him flatly. "The way you used to look, last winter."

"No reason that I should," he reassured her. "Things are going swimmingly. Now that my new assistant has rallied from the shock of his surroundings and come to a realizing sense that I prefer technical journals to tracts, he is proving a grand success. He is going to be of immense help; and I needed him, now that work is piling in. I'm hoping, though, your father can plan some way of giving me a little better use of my arms. There's a loose screw in there that he ought to tighten."

"Reed," Olive spoke thoughtfully; "you are rather unusual."

With some effort, he kept all edge of bitterness out of his voice, as he replied,—

"I certainly trust so, Olive. It wouldn't be an advantage to humanity at large to have this a normal state of things. Still, it might be worse, lots worse. I'm not nearly so soggy as I was. Which reminds me: do you mind going to the bottom of that heap of letters and taking out the square gray one. Yes. That's it. Now read it. I've saved it up for your delight."

There came a silence, broken only by the noise of unfolded paper. Then Olive looked up.

"Reed! The—"

"Don't swear, Olive," he admonished her, and now his eyes were wholly mirthful.

"I wasn't going to. I was only hunting for a suitable epithet. How does she dare?"

"Dare take unto herself the glory of what she calls my incipient cure? I wish I thought it was that; but vertebrae are vertebrae, in spite of all the Christian Scientists in all creation. As for her claim, though, she's got us there, Olive. One can't well prove an alibi, when it's a case of absent treatment. Still, I must say I like her nerve."

"When did this thing come?" And Olive cast the letter from her, with a sudden fury which, for the instant, downed her sense of humour utterly.

"Only to-day. I had meant to try a chair, to-morrow; but, in view of her predictions, I'll be hanged if I will. She would go to cackling forth that it was all her doing. How do you suppose she knew anything about me, anyway?"

"Spies, probably. Those people will stoop to anything to carry on their cause," Olive said tartly.

"Then one ought to feel a sneaking admiration for their esprit du corps, at least. In fact, if you translate the phrase literally enough, it holds the very nubbin of their whole belief. But I hope you noted the clause concerning Brenton. I am glad she even feels so much of interest in him."

Olive settled back in her chair, and yielded up her creed of married life briefly, trenchantly.

"Reed, if I owned a husband, I'd focus my mind upon his breakfasts and his buttonholes and his entertainment of an evening. That's what men want, not hifalutin' mind cures delivered at long range." Then she repented. "Still, I'm not fair to Mrs. Brenton, Reed. She doesn't interest me in the least."

"Does Brenton?" Reed asked. And then he shut his teeth, as he waited for the reply.

The reply, when it came, was direct.

"Yes, Reed; he does, intensely. He is a mass of brilliant possibilities that all are going wrong. Moreover, I can't help a feeling I could help him, if I would. I know that sometimes I have seen farther inside his mind than even he knows, and it has given me an odd feeling of responsibility over him, a responsibility that I can't see just how to carry out." Suddenly she paused. "Reed," she said; "you're not as well, to-day. What is the trouble? Are you overdoing; or has Ramsdell let you strain yourself?"

He forced a smile back to his lips, although his eyes were haggard.

"It's nothing, Olive, really." He spoke as lightly as he could. "Your imaginings concerning Brenton have lapped over on to me; that's all."

She felt the rebuke in his words, knew within herself how undeserved it was, and, rather than confess the truth, arose in her own defence.

"Not imaginings, Reed," she said, and her self-protective dignity yet hurt him. "Now and then we women do have intuitions that are trustworthy. This, I think, is one of them. And Mr. Brenton needs all the help he can get, out of any sort of source."

Reed shut his teeth upon his hurt, until he could command his voice once more. Then,—

"I agree with you there, Olive," he assented. "Moreover, I wrote to Whittenden about him, a week ago. If any one can be of use, it will be Whittenden; he always knows what tonic it is best to prescribe. Must you go?" He looked up at her appealingly. Then the same appeal came into his voice, set it to throbbing with an accent wholly new to Olive's ears. "Olive," he said; "you're not going to misunderstand me, not going to allow Brenton to come in between us?"

Suddenly the girl went white; suddenly she bent down to rest her hand on his, in one of the few, few touches she had ever given his fingers since the day he had been brought home and laid there in his room, powerless to withdraw himself from too insistent human contacts. Her voice, when she spoke, had a throb that matched his own.

"Never, Reed!" she said.

A moment later, she was gone, leaving Opdyke there alone, to wonder and, wondering, to worry.

Two afternoons later, Duncan, the new assistant, brought up a message from the laboratory. Brenton would be at leisure, soon after four. Might he come up? That was just after luncheon. Therefore two hours would intervene, two hours for a quiet going over of certain things that Reed Opdyke felt it was for him alone to say, certain measures for Olive's safety which he alone should take. Indeed, there was no other man who stood, to Olive's mind, so nearly in a brother's place; no other man, it seemed to Opdyke, who owned one half so good a right to test the ground on which she stood, to assure himself that she might venture forward safely.

Opdyke was no sentimentalist. Nevertheless, he recognized all that it might portend when such a girl as Olive Keltridge, the soul of sanity and downrightness, talked about her comprehension of a man like Brenton. Moreover, Opdyke was no gossip. Nevertheless, he had not failed to hear a certain amount of speculation as to the possibilities of Brenton's seeking a divorce. Sought, there was no question of his getting it. Katharine's desertion was an established fact past all gainsaying.

And, if he sought it and won it, what then? Merely the helping him become as well worth while, as well worth Olive's while, as it was possible for any man to be. This was the task which Reed had set himself; the task for which he was bracing himself, during those two endless hours; the task for the accomplishment of which he was resolved, if need be, to tear away the coverings which, up to now, he had held fast above certain of the reticences of his own life. The tearing would be sure to hurt; but what of that? Olive, given the opportunity, would have done as much for him.

The afternoon lengthened interminably, and the clock was striking the half-hour, when Brenton finally came up the stairs. His face was grave, as he greeted his old friend, his eyes a little overcast and heavy.

Reed jerked his head in the direction of a chair.

"Sit down," he said hospitably; "and then fill up your pipe. Duncan doesn't smoke, worse luck; and I find I miss the old aroma. It's rather like incense offered to the ghost of my old self."

His accent was trivial, and Brenton, listening to the apparently careless words, could form no notion of the pains that had gone into their choosing.

"Your new self, I should say. It's astounding, Opdyke, the way you've picked yourself out of the rut and gone rushing ahead again."

"With a difference, though," Reed told him bluntly. "Is the jar full? You like the kind?"

"Yes, thanks." And Brenton filled his pipe. After a minute's puffing, "After all, Opdyke, you have pretty well minimized the difference," he observed.

"Thanks to Ramsdell and Duncan, yes. They have been wonderful props, and it's good to get on my professional legs again, whatever my bodily ones may do for me. Meanwhile, how are things going with you?"

Brenton smoked in silence for a minute. Then,—

"The wraith of my departed priestly calling forbids me to phrase my answer just as I'd like best to do," he said.

Reed nodded.

"So bad as that? What is the matter now?"

"It's hard to specify. I seem to have run myself aground."

"Pull off, then," Reed advised.

"No craft in sight to tow me."

Reed shut his teeth.

"Brenton, that has been your trouble from the start. You've always been drifting, anchor up, ready for a tow. Now hoist your sails and, for the Lord's sake, go ahead."

"Where?"

"Where! Wherever the chart takes you. What chart? The chart of plain duty, man, the duty of an honest citizen to make the most of himself and be a little good to humanity at large. No; wait. You've had your chances; you can't cry off on that. You had your chance, 'way back in college, and you chucked it over. How much more would it have hurt your mother to have seen you once for all take up a secular profession, than it would to have watched you setting out to preach all the things her own religion didn't stand for? You had another chance in Saint Peter's. It wasn't a small chance, either. You could have held that church together, solid; you could have brought its people to a working assent to a practical exposition of their creed that would have kept them busy and loyal to their Creator, in doing their duty to their co-created fellow men. Instead, you ignored your chance to keep them busy on things that would help on the world we live in, and spent all your energies in tangling up your notions of the world we came out of, and the world we, some day, are going into. As mental gymnastics, it was very pretty to watch; as a useful employment for a man who calls himself a pastor of souls, it wasn't worth a rush."

"But a man can't help his thoughts," Brenton expostulated suddenly.

"Can't he?" Reed whitened. "Brenton," he asked gravely; "don't you suppose that there have been times on times, since they lugged me up these stairs, that, if I had let myself go, I wouldn't have turned my face to the wall and cursed, not only the whole plan of creation, but the Creator himself? Times on times that, if I hadn't held tight to a few rudimentary notions that I took in with my mother's milk, notions about the decent and square thing to do for the God that made you, I wouldn't have tested the logic of your doubtings with a dose of cyanide? I tell you a man can help his thoughts. I tell you a man can hold to his beliefs. He can wonder about the petty things as much as he chooses, and it never does him one bit of harm. But the final great belief of all, that there is a wise Creator back of things, and that we owe Him at least as much loyal courtesy as we give to the best of our brother men: that is something it is in the hands of any man to hold on to, if he chooses. Brenton, I hate to lecture you," and, with a sudden gesture brimful of appealing for forgiveness, for loyal comprehension, Reed stretched out his hand; "but you have got to bring yourself up with a round turn. In some way or other, you have missed your chances. You have gone rushing off for shiny butterflies, when you ought to have stopped at home and milked the cows. Something," he smiled; "Whittenden says it was my downfall, set you to asking questions that you were too nearsighted to answer. Instead of sticking to a few fundamental bits of faith, you made yourself a ladder out of theological catchwords, clambered up it and kicked out all the rungs, one after another, as you climbed. Then you turned dizzy, and lost your grip, and fell all in a heap. Brenton, we've had about the same experience, one way or another, out of life."

"But you have braced up again and gone ahead," Brenton said slowly.

"So will you, man. That's why I am harrying you now, to start you up again. We neither one of us are half through our allotted term of years. In simple decency, we've got to play out the game."

"If we can," Brenton interrupted.

"No if about it. We've got it to do. Of course, we can't do it in quite the same old way. Be plucky as we can, it's impossible for us to deny that we've been scarred—badly; that the scars, some of them, can never really heal. Still, as long as we've a year ahead of us and a drop of fighting blood inside us—Brenton, it isn't easy; but it's our one way to prove we're game."

Then, for a while, the room was very still. At last, Reed spoke once more.

"Scott," he said slowly, and the old name held a note of great love; "once on a time, you didn't resent it when I told you that old Mansfield asked me to take you in hand and show you a few things out of my own experience. Don't resent it now. We've been too good friends for too many years for that."

Ramsdell's steady step came up the stairs, and Reed went on quite simply.