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

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

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

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

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

"Likewise the characters," Dolph Dennison assured him, sotto voce.

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

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

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

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

"Ahem!" Dolph strangled suddenly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER TWELVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Come in."

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

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

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

The professor nodded.

"There's been an accident."

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

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

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

"When did you hear?"

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

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

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

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

"Just how bad is it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olive lifted her brows.

"Who?"

"Brenton."

"Haven't you seen him yet?"

Reed shook his head.

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

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

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

Reed digressed.

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

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

"Impossible."

"I'm not surprised."

"You had seen her?"

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

This time, Olive felt called on to remonstrate.

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

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

Olive nodded.

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

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

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

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

But Olive held up her hand for mercy.

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

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

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

"And you embezzled it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reed's comment was a terse one.

"Shy! She!" he said.

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

Reed squirmed.

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

Olive's colour came, though not from annoyance.

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

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

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

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

But she shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olive rose to the defence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reed laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER FOURTEEN

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

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

"Well?" the doctor queried.

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

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

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

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

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

"I do not."

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

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

"I do not," he said.

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

Brenton's lips stiffened.

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

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

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

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

Brenton nodded curtly.

"That's about the size of it."

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

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

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

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

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

The doctor laughed, in comfortable comprehension.

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

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

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

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

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

Brenton's answer echoed the selfsame note.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sometimes both," Brenton answered restlessly.

Reed's eyes opened, with a snap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just once, he thought he had impressed her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In total silence, he shook his head.

There was a little pause, while Kathryn's teeth met in the soft ripe olive. Then,—

"Well, it was this: that final gesture of yours is awfully effective. You know the one I mean, your hands shut on your stole just at your shoulders? I hate to have you give it up; but, really, I'm afraid you'll have to. In the long run, it is bound to get your stoles shabby, especially the white one; and, now I have all the—the little things to make, I can't keep embroidering new stoles. After this, when you see me making up the face I put on, this morning, you'll please remember it must be 'hands down'. Another olive? Take them away then, Mary."

That same afternoon, Reed Opdyke was astounded to receive a long call from his recreant parson.



CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"Where away?"

With the question, Dolph Dennison flung himself into step at Olive Keltridge's side, one morning in late January. Two inches of snow crackling under foot and a coating of hoarfrost on all the elm trees was answering as a fair substitute for winter; and the blood of both young people was tingling with even that unwonted sting. Nevertheless, though walking briskly, Olive had been lost in a brown study, and she started, as Dolph's genial hail fell on her ears. Then she nodded gayly.

"Ditto. Why aren't you in class?" she demanded.

"It's low-minded to be eternally talking shop," he told her. "Why can't you for once let me delude myself into the belief that I'm like a lily of the field, without a spinning wheel in sight?"

"A lily in a fur-lined coat!" Olive's accent was disdainful. "You ought to be ashamed to be rolled up like this, this splendid morning."

Dolph eyed her seal jacket accusingly.

"I am," he confessed. "I'm immensely proud of my fur lining, and I hate like thunder to go out, buttoned up. One might as well be lined with quilted farmer satin, with an imitation-mink shawl collar, for all the glory he gets out of winter. That's where you women score; you wear your wool outside."

"Yes; but we don't turn up our collars, a day like this," Olive mocked him. "Really, Dolph, you're growing soft. But you haven't answered my question. Why aren't you at a class?"

"You're so beastly insistent, Olive. What's the use? If you must know, I've given the dear children a cut, this morning. One of them came prowling into class, all broken out with mumps; that is, if you can call it broken out, when there is only one of it and as large as a camel's hump. Anyhow, I freely offered them a cut, and advised them all to go to their homes and to disinfect themselves with due discretion."

"And you?" Olive inquired.

"Me? I'm immune. I haven't cheek enough to begin to swell up like that. Accordingly, I am merely taking a walk, while I cultivate my muse."

"And I'm to be the muse's understudy?" Olive laughed. "Thank you, I'm otherwise engaged."

"You looked it, when I met you. What's doing?"

"Household economics. I'm going the rounds of the basement bargain counters, hunting dish towelling."

"What's the use?"

"To dry the dishes," Olive told him literally. "One doesn't want to eat things in a puddle."

Dolph stuck his hands into the pockets of his coat. Then he turned to face her rebukefully.

"What a concrete mind you do have, Olive! I wish you'd come into my classes; I'd teach you how to generalize, and give you some much-needed lessons in beauty of diction. You mean well; but you certainly do talk like a housemaid, and—Good morning, Mr. Brenton. Jolly sort of morning, too!" Then Dolph digressed. "What in thunder is the matter with that fellow, Olive?"

"Matter?" Olive tried her best to look surprised at the question.

"No use shamming. You are perfectly aware that something has gone wrong with the dominie, and he's on his nerves," Dolph told her coolly. "Besides, why should you be denying it? One only tells fibs about one's own responsibilities, and you aren't responsible for Brenton, as far as I know."

"Heaven forbid!" Olive replied, with hasty piety. "I have all the responsibility I can endure, with you and Reed."

"Best cut out Opdyke, then, and focus it all on me," Dolph advised her genially. "I need it, and I shall repay your effort, seven-fold." Then he digressed again, this time without a trace of humour. "Olive, for a fact, how is Opdyke?" he inquired.

"Haven't you seen him lately?"

"Yes, of course." Dolph spoke with some impatience. "That's the reason I am asking. I go in there, as often as I can spend the time and stand the strain."

Olive edged a trifle nearer to the fur-lined elbow.

"You feel it, too, Dolph?"

"Good Lord, yes! How could anybody help it, anybody with a nerve in his composition? It takes it out of one tremendously, Olive," Dolph frowned intently; "and it's a curious fact that it takes it out of me worse on his good days than on his bad ones."

Olive glanced up sharply.

"I didn't know he had any bad ones; at least, not to show them out."

Dolph shook his head at the street in general.

"That's the woman of you, Olive; the woman in you, I mean. Opdyke is morally bound to hold it all in, when you're in sight and hearing. No man that's half a man will squeak before a woman, and Opdyke's all man, fast enough. Yes, poor devil, he does have his bad days, like all the rest of us. However, the rest of us can arise and lick somebody, if the spirit moves us; and poor old Opdyke has to lie still and take it out in swearing. He does swear, too; and now and then his temper is positively vitriolic."

"Reed's?" Olive's voice betrayed indignation, incredulity.

"Rather." Dolph laughed. "On one or two occasions, it has risen to that level." Then he sobered. "Don't begrudge him the relief of it, Olive. It's his one salvation, his one road of escape from something that easily might be madness. Have you thought about the change it's made for him?"

"Dolph! Do any of us ever think of anything else?"

For an instant, he eyed her keenly, apparently seeking to discover what underlay her words. Then,—

"Not when we are with him, I fancy," he assented. "And, of course, I never knew him much till now, so even I can't take it all in, the way you do. Still, I can imagine it a little, imagine what it must be, to an out-door man like him, to be shut up in that one room, packed in with all the frilly duds Mrs. Opdyke has stuffed in around him. Really, I'd feel exactly like a mutton chop in a tissue-paper flounce, myself. The frills add to the ignominy. Why can't she let him have the good of all the bare, empty space he can get, even if it isn't much?"

Olive interrupted.

"Dolph, you're not the dunce you might be. That's a good idea."

He nodded.

"It's common sense. Fancy, Olive, if you were laid low, which heaven forfend, and had to live mainly on the fruits of your imagination, wouldn't you grow more of those fruits on a bit of blank, sunny wall than on a perfect trellis work of messy little pictures and ruffled lace and calico hangings? It's worth your while to think it over, and then to summon Mrs. Opdyke to think it over with you. We men want space, not gimcracks. But, about his temper, do be discreet and forget that I told tales. I supposed of course you knew it, knew it was bound to come out now and then. He's got to have some sort of escape valve; now all the more, since your father has shut down upon his smoking. Really, Olive, that was beastly mean of him, I must say." Dolph turned on her accusingly.

"I didn't know he had. Reed always has smoked, I know."

"It was only day before yesterday. I suppose you'd set him down a baby, if I hinted that the water came into his eyes, while he was telling me. Olive," Dolph flung out the question with a certain desperation; "for God's sake, how long has this thing got to go on?"

"Dolph, I don't know."

"Doesn't your father ever say things?"

"Not of that sort. He never does. Besides, seeing Reed, as I do, almost every day, it's better that I shouldn't know."

"But you must think," he urged. "Really, Olive, the thing is going on all our nerves; anyhow, on mine. I can't see that great, strong fellow lie there, all these eight months, and keep steady as he does, and come to know him as I'm doing, know he has been, and is, more of a man than most of us are ever likely to be: I can't watch him, I tell you, and keep my grip on my sense of humour. I like Opdyke better than I like most men; I'd miss him more than most. Still, Olive," and the face above the fur-lined coat was suddenly grown grim; "watching him as I do, I can't help feeling that it would have been a mercy, if only he had been killed outright."

"Hush!" Olive turned upon him sternly; sternly she spoke. "That's not for us to say, Dolph. There's a plan back of things, you know, and Reed is only part of the plan."

There came a short silence. Then Dolph spoke, not angrily, yet with decision.

"Olive, I think I am just a little bit ashamed of you for that. I'm willing to be a fatalist, and say it was ordained from the beginning that Opdyke must be flayed and hung up for the crows of time to pick; but as for saying in a hushed voice that he is the especial object of some wholly beneficent and divine plan, I can't do it, and I won't. A thing like that would be enough to leave a trail of beastliness over the whole mass of revealed religion; in the end it would turn one to a veritable pagan. Is this the entrance to your bargain counter? Good bye, then. And, for heaven's sake, remember that sometimes the personal hurt of a thing may blind a man to the ultimate and underlying beneficence of the plan that knocked him over. Watch Opdyke, not when he is swearing picturesquely, but when his mouth shuts and gets white around the corners with the mental pain, not the physical; and then you will take in what I mean." And Dolph, his face uncommonly grave and overcast, nodded shortly and went on his way, his fists stuffed into his pockets and his grim face half buried in his cavernous collar.

And, meanwhile, the poor "puffic' fibbous" lay and fidgetted uneasily, while he wondered why Olive Keltridge had chosen that day, of all days, to delay her customary call. She was not ill. Ramsdell, his nurse, had seen her pass the house, that morning, walking with the swift, alert step which Opdyke knew so well, the step that, in the old days, had accompanied his boyish explorations of every by-path in the region. No; something had detained her. She would surely be in later; and Reed strained his ears, hour after hour, to listen for the buzz of the front-door bell.

At last it buzzed, and the long form relaxed its stiffening. Half past five! That meant the shortest possible time for talk. Still, it would be better than nothing; the half-loaf would keep him from going hungry to bed. His eyes were eager, as he watched the door. Then the eagerness went out of them. The door swung open. Not Olive, but Prather, the fussy little novelist, came in. Opdyke's lean fingers shut savagely upon the rug that covered him. It would have been a relief if he could have torn it into tatters.

Later, that night, after Ramsdell had shunted him back into bed, and had covered him up as carefully as one covers a six-months baby, and had put the room in order for the night, and then had uttered his nightly query if that was "really hall, sir," left to himself, Reed Opdyke set out to become very philosophical as concerned his predicament. He merely succeeded in becoming very conscious of his utter, aching loneliness, the loneliness which only comes to those suddenly deprived of action.

Of course, he acknowledged to himself, a man of his training and experience ought to have untold possibilities of interest inherent in himself. He ought to be able to dip a bucket into his brain, and pull it up, dripping with all sorts of new and amusing thoughts which should keep him brilliant company for hours and hours. He ought to be able to lose the consciousness of the narrow present in the wide sweep of his past memories. He ought to be able to blockade his mind to any speculations as concerned his future usefulness by raising up a perfect barricade of past memories, and then by sitting down on top of the barricade and gloating because it was a little higher than that upbuilt by the next man.

Moreover, when those purely personal interests failed him, if purely personal interests did ever fail a man, he had only to summon Ramsdell and set him to reading aloud to him. To be sure, Ramsdell had a trick of chopping up his sentences into separate words, as the primary-school child spells its words by separate letters. Still, if it destroyed somewhat of the sense, it at least increased the interest, since only the most profound attention could discover the pith of any paragraph, when every syllable in that paragraph was uttered with the same deliberate stress.

And then there was his father. To Opdyke's certain knowledge, the good professor curtailed by hours and hours and hours his more congenial occupations for the sake of helping his son to work out the chess problems in which they both were taking a perfunctory delight. Reed did unfeignedly enjoy his father's company; but that was no reason he should reduce him to a captivity akin to his own. How long had it lasted, anyhow? May, June—nine months. And, in all that time, Olive never had missed, until to-day.

Opdyke made a wry face at the darkness. So he had come back to that, after all the fuss. What a kid he was, despite his six-feet three, and the time he had gone under the knife, unwincing, but fully conscious, because his heart was weak just then and the doctors were afraid of anaesthetics! Afterwards, when the affair was safely over, they had said things about his pluck. And now here he was, bewailing his fate because Olive had, just the once, failed to put in her appearance for her daily call. Pluck be hanged! And Olive had been wonderfully loyal, all these months. Knowing her popularity abroad and her busy life at home, he could not fail to be aware, when he stopped to think about it, that she must have given up any amount of pleasanter engagements, for the simple sake of coming to see him.

What made her do it, anyway? Liking? Conscience?

Opdyke gritted his teeth. One accepts liking with all due gratitude, however far it may be removed from any sentiment. It is a wholly different thing to feel one's self the object of a conscientious visitation. In the latter case, one longs to throw a whiskbroom at the head of the entering guest, longs to have it hit him, brush end on. Moreover, it is a peculiarity of self-communion in the watches of the night, to have the least lovely theory strike one as the more unassailable. Therefore, without delay, Reed Opdyke adopted the belief in Olive's conscientious devotedness to his welfare. Indeed, between the pangs where the points of his new theory pricked him sorely, he found plenty of room to wonder why the idea had not occurred to him till then. What an insufferable ass he was, to have been thinking that her frequent calls had been due to any other motive! He had been looking upon himself, in spite of his flatness, as being to all intents and purposes her social equal. Now, without warning, he was driven to relegate himself to the lower levels of a sort of all-year Lenten penance.

All-year! Yes, that was it. That was the secret of her failure to come in, that day. Or, rather, for Opdyke was nothing, if not accurate, the day before. It was to-morrow now. The clock had struck one, long ago. Or was it half-past? He always did lose count, in those three successive ones. Anyway, Olive's benevolent zeal had flagged a little, before the demands made by a chronic case. Opdyke gritted his teeth anew, as he acknowledged to himself that he was fast becoming desperately chronic. Then his breath caught at the word. The worst of his forecastings had never hit on anything so bad as that. And all the others knew it; perhaps they had known it for some time. That was the reason, of course, that the number of his calls had been falling off a good deal lately; their charitable courage had ebbed and then ended before so permanent a proposition.

Olive had known it, too; her father would have told her first of all. And, until now, her loyalty had still held good. Dolph, too, would know it. Indeed, they all of them had known it, all with the sole exception of himself, the victim. They had known it and had talked it over together, had talked him over, him, Reed Opdyke, late consulting engineer for the Colorado Limited—

And then, across the stillness of the dusky room, there came a sound, husky, strangled, a sound strangely like a sob.

Next morning, Opdyke faced the doctor, wan, but plucky.

"Doctor," he said; "I want those fellows to come up from New York again, to look me over."

The doctor stared at him, a moment.

"What's the use?" he said then.

Reed's smile was grim.

"That's what I want to know. It's time that they found out, if they're ever going to."

The doctor's glasses fell off with a click, and then hung, swinging, from their thick black cord. When their oscillation had all ended,—

"What has started up your curiosity just now, Reed?"

"Signs of the times, I suppose," Reed answered crisply. "What's more, doctor, I don't quite like them."

Bending forward, the doctor laid a steady hand upon the lean wrist beside him. As he had supposed, the pulse was leaping with a furious unsteadiness.

"Who taught a mere engineer like you to read the signs?" he demanded.

The pulse raced a little faster. Then Reed replied,—

"My inherent common sense."

"Your inherent self-conceit, you'd better say," the doctor retorted curtly. "What's more, you lay awake to read them? Three quarters of the night? Yes? I thought so. Next time, though, I'll trouble you to let your signs alone. You've got to learn their alphabet straight, before you go to work to get much meaning out of them. Anyway, they are my care, not yours." Then, as the pulse steadied down a little, the doctor spoke more gently. "Boy, what is it that you need to know?"