Under the strong, heedful fingers, the pulse gave one great leap, stopped, then fell to pounding madly. Meanwhile, there came a tightening of Opdyke's lips. Then he said, with a voice devoid of any intonation,—

"Doctor, I think it has come to where I need to know the outcome of all this."

"Reed boy, I thought so." The doctor's hand, leaving the wrist, came to rest upon the nearer shoulder with a grip which was like a benediction. "It has been a fearful time of waiting. I wish I could tell you what the end will be; but—Reed, I can't."

"You mean you won't," Opdyke corrected him a little sharply.

But Doctor Keltridge forgave the sharpness, as his eyes rested on the drawn, white face.

"I mean I can't," he iterated. "Reed, that's the damned cruelty of the whole position, for you and for us who care for you. It would have been any amount easier to have accepted things at their worst, months ago, than to keep on in this grilling indecision, fearing everything and yet hanging on to every vestige of hope for something better. Don't think I haven't been realizing that, my boy, ever since they brought you in and tucked you up in that infernal bed. It wouldn't have been one half so hard for you, then, or since, if you'd known that you'd step down and out of it at any given time, or even that you were there to stay for ever. It's the uncertainty that kills. And that—"

"Well?" Reed asked him steadily.

"Is just as great as ever."

"You mean?"

The doctor straightened in his chair, stiffening himself to administer the bitter draught.

"That the dozen best surgeons in the country never could agree on it, whether you will come out of this thing, or not. All we can do is to grip our courage, and leave the matter—"

"On the knees of Allah?" Reed asked a little bitterly.

The doctor's reply was grave.

"Yes, Reed. Upon the knees of Allah and within the hands of modern science. They are bound to work together, in a case like this."

The grip upon Reed's shoulder tightened for a minute. Then it fell away, and again the supple fingers shut upon Reed's wrist.

"It's no especial use to preach to you about keeping up your courage, Reed. You're bound to do that, being you. I only wish I could have given you a squarer answer to your question; but—I can't. Now, about the surgeons: you'd like to have them come up again?"

Reed shook his head, and the gesture was a weary one.

"No use, doctor. I believe you—now. I had thought you were putting me off, out of a mistaken sense of friendship, and that I'd be able to worm the facts of the case from them. However, now you admit that the present uncertainty is the worst thing of all, I'm ready to take your word—only—it hurts! All night, I've been bracing myself to take it, and now nobody knows when it will come, or how." For a little while, he lay quite still; and the doctor sat still beside him, waiting. At last, Reed looked up with a forced alertness. "How is Olive?" he inquired, quite in his ordinary tone.

Instantly the doctor's face changed, lost its look of waiting strain, grew frankly worried.

"Reed, I wish I knew," he said.

"Is she ill?" Opdyke's voice sharpened.

"No; she's all right, only something has upset her. Didn't she come here, yesterday? No? I thought she was in here, every day; and maybe that—" The doctor checked himself abruptly.

A ghost of a smile flitted across Reed's face, although the hair still lay damp upon his temples.

"That we had been fighting, doctor?" he inquired. "Your fatherly fears misled you. I haven't seen her for two days."

"Queer!" It was evident that Doctor Keltridge, as he rose, was thinking things out loud. "She was all right at breakfast, jolly as you please. Then she went out on some errands. I was out for luncheon, and so missed her. When she came down to dinner, she hadn't any appetite and was very feverish. What's more, if it had been anybody but Olive, I'd have vowed she'd cried her eyes out, all the afternoon."

"And this morning?" Reed's accent showed that he was profoundly worried. Tears, indeed, were out of all harmony with his experience of Olive Keltridge.

The doctor's reply came crisply.

"Apparently, she'd cried them in again." Then once more he bent above the couch where Opdyke lay. "Hang on to the tail of every sort of hope, Reed," he bade him cheerily. "It's not an especially amusing occupation; but it is about the only thing for us to do at present. I'll look in on you, in the morning, to make sure how you slept. By the way," he tossed the last words back across the threshold; "as long as you haven't much else upon your hands, I think I'll order Olive to come down here, and let you cheer her up a little." And, before Reed could answer, he was gone.



CHAPTER SIXTEEN

If Reed Opdyke had gained any inkling of the wide swath of woe and consequent spiritual doubtings that he was cutting among the closest of his personal friends, he would have fallen to plucking out his hair in mingled rage and shamed amusement. Mercifully, however, that humiliating knowledge was denied him. As a rule, one keeps that sort of questionings from their subject; as a rule, he is the last person in the world to be aware of them.

Reed Opdyke, then, was thoroughly perplexed, next afternoon, when Brenton walked in upon him. The change in the young rector, more than usually obvious, that afternoon, took Opdyke by surprise. He had gained no inkling that anything was going really wrong, in that direction. To all outward seeming, Scott Brenton ought to have been riding on the crest of the ecclesiastical wave. In worldly parlance, Saint Peter's Parish was on the boom. The administration of it had completely outgrown Brenton's time and strength, and a curate was in prospect, with a deaconess or two lurking in the more remote perspective.

Brenton himself, meanwhile, had been too full of work for making many calls. He had telephoned to Opdyke, nearly every day, had sent him clever articles to read, and things of that sort; but he had not been to see his old friend, since the last day of the year. Pastoral conversation had never been especially popular between the two men; yet each of them was well aware that, all things considered, an old-year call was a more fitting visitation than a new-year one for Opdyke. At least one knew the worst of the old year, and some comfort could be taken out of that. Indeed, next morning, Olive Keltridge wished that she had followed out the rector's plan. However, Opdyke's courage was better than her own. When she stood up to go away, he wished her a happy New Year with a nonchalance apparently quite genuine and free from envy. Nevertheless, something in his accent brought the stinging tears to Olive's eyes. Another year, such as the past eight months—

"Ditto to you, Reed!" she answered gayly. "I do hope it will find you back in the field again."

He nodded. Then,—

"But think how lonesome you would be," he reminded her.

And Olive went her way, thinking. Indeed, she thought so earnestly about the fact that it was some time before she noticed that the phrase, still ringing in her ears, was in the optative, not in the simple future which she herself would have used in that connection. Was her father keeping things back from her, by way of helping her to maintain her poise? Did Reed himself know things of which she was in ignorance? Foolish, especially when they were friends and nothing more! It was a friend's place to know the worst of things, and help him bear them. The questions, though, stayed with her for many days. They had been, indeed, at the back of her abstraction, when Dolph Dennison had greeted her, that January morning.

Mingled with them, too, had been some other questions, questions akin to those lashing Scott Brenton's brain. However, in the case of Olive, they were incidental. With Brenton, they shook the foundations of his whole professional career.

Indeed, it seemed to Brenton, looking down upon the still, straight figure of his friend, that it was little short of the incredible that Reed Opdyke, the hilarious, the irresponsible, could be the present cause and focus of a storm which was bidding fair to make a shipwreck of his life. If only Brenton had been aware how, long ago, Opdyke had been detailed to show him life as it was, and to teach him what an ass he easily might become, there would have been a certain fitness, to his mind, in the later situation. Once more Opdyke had been detailed to show him life as it really was, life and some other things, to point out to him, not what an ass he might, but what a hypocrite he had, become.

Nowadays, it was that latter word which Brenton was using, as a spiritual flail, upon himself. Reed Opdyke's overthrow no longer filled the whole horizon of his doubtings. It was merely the starting-point whence he had embarked on a voyage long and perilous. At first, he only had felt a vague suspicion concerning the inherent justice and clemency of the manifestations of special Providence, a little wondering whether the God whom he had chosen to preach to all men was of necessity so much more merciful and fatherly in his dealing with the sons of men than was the irate God of all the line of Parson Wheelers. They would have laid down the law quite frankly that Reed Opdyke had been overtaken and cut down, in revenge for his more or less hereditary sins. He was holding forth to the effect that Reed had been smitten sorely, regretfully, in order that his spiritual betterment be effected with all due promptness, and with all due attention from his fellow men. To how much, after all, did the difference amount?

Sunday after Sunday during those interminable eight months when Reed had lain still and gritted his teeth to keep himself from waxing too profane, he himself, Scott Brenton, robed in the stainless garb of his holy calling, had stood up before his people and stained his conscience by uttering platitudes to that effect. Then, sermon over and the service, he had gone away and lavished upon Reed Opdyke a purely human sympathy that was totally unlike the exalted pity of the priest. In other words, as concerned Reed Opdyke, Brenton's attitude was two-faced, human, priestly; two-faced, and the two faces were mutually antagonistic.

Worst of all, the doubtings did not focus themselves upon the solitary instance. They spread and spread, until they honeycombed his entire belief. Was God sometimes a little bit vindictive? Did the All-merciful have moods that would have shamed created man? Did the All-Father now and then punish, out of sheer malevolence, or in an attempt to get even with man for the results of instincts He had put into him at first creation? Was that first creation final in its wisdom; or had it been a partial blunder, needing the interference of a heaven-sent, earth-born Intercessor to set the matter right? Could the All-Wise make a blunder? If not, then why the Atoning Son? In short, aside from some mysterious force which had set certain laws to rolling like mammoth, ever-growing snowballs down the slopes of time and on into a cold, bleak eternity where everything was swept up in their courses, was there ever any—

At this point in his never-ending circle, Scott Brenton usually started to his feet, seized his hat and stick and shut his study door behind him. All out-doors was too small to think in. Violent exercise was the one fit setting for such thought. In the end, though, the wish for exercise only took him down across the valley, and spent itself just as he reached the river's brink. There, on the long white bridge, he stood by the half-hour at a time, his arms folded on the rail, his eyes fixed vaguely on the wintry current, a steel-gray stretch of sliding, slipping water down which the rough white ice cakes came floating, drifting silently, relentlessly, unendingly, to crash against the stone piers of the bridge. In that same way, out of the gray, bleak perspective of his thoughts, the doubts came floating, drifting down upon him with the same relentlessness, to crash against the foundations of his belief. Between the two of them, however, there was this difference: the piers were never chipped or shaken by the ice cakes. He could not say as much as that for his beliefs.

It was all very well to choose, as he had done, a more elastic creed, to fling his life's allegiance into a communion whose tenets were so framed as to adjust themselves to the strain of purely individual interpretation. One must have tenets to interpret. What happened, when they became untenable? One might construe the Nicene Creed into a round dozen different 'ologies. A mere framework, a skeleton of belief such as the Apostles' Creed was capable of no such reconstruction. One either believed it, or one did not. Unless—Did anybody ever believe any one thing in its unmodified entirety? Did anybody ever give a categorical denial to any clause of any creed? That was the worst of the whole matter. Half-doubts and half-beliefs crisscrossed and interlaced at every point. One day's doctrine was the next day's error. It was well-nigh impossible to draw a straight line, no matter how short, and take one's stand upon it, and say out boldly I believe, and then add just as boldly I shall keep on believing.

After all, though, that was what he professed to do. The outward setting of his life, from the early celebration of a Sunday morning down to the virtuous reversal of his collar buttons, was the badge of his profession. In his secret heart, as the Advent season came and went, and as the Lenten penances drew near, Scott Brenton had no way of telling where in reality he stood; yet, day by day and week by week, he had to step forth before his congregation and toilsomely erect a platform of belief upon which, in the end, his feet refused to mount. Instead, with every semblance of priestly humility, he stood aside and assisted his hearers to clamber up ahead of him. Once there, he knew that he could count upon their smug enjoyment of their own eminence to make them forget to notice whether or not he took his stand beside them.

Of course, he despised himself acutely. Of course, he had hours and moods when he felt that he must lift up his voice and shout aloud to all men—What? That he did not know exactly what he did believe? For, in reality, that was all the whole pother was amounting to. What was the use in starting the alarm, when the whole great crisis might be merely a matter of imagination, of indigestion, even, as Doctor Keltridge had diagnosed it? In that case, the best, the only remedy was work.

And work Scott Brenton did. The parish was growing, month by month. The mere detail of its executive alone was enough to tax the strength of most men. Brenton managed it, however; he also contrived to get into the day's work as much of pastoral visitation as he could accomplish, without running into the adulation with which he was uncomfortably aware he was surrounded. The evenings and a good portion of the nights he devoted to his sermons which never had been so brilliant as now, never so vibrant with the essential truths of personal morality, of earnest service. Indeed, his professional life, just then, seemed rounding itself into a never-ending circle: the harder he worked, the more inspiring were his sermons, thus broadening and deepening his grasp upon his hearers. And this, in turn, put new vitality into his parish needs, and so increased his work past any computation.

It would have been no especial wonder, then, that this revolving circle should shut him in entirely from any chance to see an old chum like Reed Opdyke. Opdyke himself accepted the explanation. Brenton knew it was false, and flagrantly so. He longed acutely to sit down beside his old friend, to unburden himself to the very dregs and then to sort over the dregs, discussing them and judging them in the light of Opdyke's old, shrewd common sense and in the clearer light of Opdyke's new and illuminating experience. How could he, though, when the whole mental situation had evolved itself over his kicking against the pricks administered to his old-time idol? To discuss the matter with Reed Opdyke would have been equivalent to sticking a knife into him, and then inviting him to take a microscope and study the composition of the drops that oozed up around the knife blade.

And then, one day, he yielded to temptation, and went to call upon Reed Opdyke, not to indulge in theoretical discussion concerning the accident viewed as an exponent of universal truths; but for the simple sake of seeing his old friend and exchanging greetings. Indeed, where was the use of wasting the good material of friendship by seeking to convert it to a touchstone whereby to measure up one's theological beliefs? Reed was Reed, albeit flattened out upon his long, lean back, and not a culture-pan for psychological germs.

A good deal to his own regret, Brenton met Olive Keltridge on the Opdyke's steps.

"I'm so glad you've come, Mr. Brenton," she said cordially, as she gave him her hand in greeting. "Reed has been wondering what had become of you. No; not that, exactly. My father and I both had told him that Saint Peter's was working you to death. Still, he has missed you, and his father is actually pathetic in his mourning. He told me, yesterday, that you had never seen his new hood. Really, it sounded rather feminine, his pride in that new hood of his. You'd have thought it must be a creation of chiffon and ermine, not of ordinary brick and mortar. How is Mrs. Brenton?"

"Quite well, thank you."

The maid was slow about appearing, and Olive chatted on, by way of filling up the time.

"I'm glad. It is two weeks or so, since I have seen her. She told me then that she hardly caught a glimpse of you, all day long. Indeed, she was almost as pathetic about it as Professor Opdyke. It really is too bad for the church to keep you quite so busy."

"But, if it is my work?" Brenton interrupted banally, for, in his secret heart, he was painfully aware that it was not the church alone which kept him so preoccupied that his preoccupation had come to be an occupation on its own account.

"Your work needn't be suicidal," Olive objected. "My father, even, says it is taking it out of you rather badly, and he insists that they must hurry about the curate. Seven hours a day is enough for any man, he says; and he declares that you are working twenty. In fact," Olive looked up at him to carry home her admonition; "he says that he has warned you more than once that you must slow down a little, or else stop."

"At least, that would be restful." Brenton spoke more to himself than Olive.

But she turned on him.

"Reed hasn't found it so," she said.

Brenton's face changed, clouded.

"That is an extreme case, Miss Keltridge." Then, with an effort, he changed the subject and became frankly personal. "How is Opdyke getting on?"

She shook her head.

"He isn't getting on, unless you count as the on a distinct gain in the beauty of holiness. No," she interrupted him with a sudden gesture; "I don't mean the kind of holiness you preach, on Sunday; but the kind we both of us admire, on Monday morning."

"Is there a difference?" he queried, while his gray eyes searched her face.

She met his eyes unflinchingly.

"Isn't there? Preacher that you are, I defy you to deny it."

And then the maid opened the door before them, and they passed in.

Once in the hall, however, Olive changed her mind about going up to Reed's room.

"I think I'll wait, Mr. Brenton," she said suddenly. "Really, I have nothing much ahead of me, to-day. I can come in later, just as well; and you are a novelty, in these latter days. Go on alone, and talk man-talk to Reed. It will do him any amount more good than dozens of my visitations. Just don't tell him I was here, and then he won't have any qualms about holding on to you till the last possible minute. I'll come in again."

"But—"

"No but about it. I tell you he needs men. In fact, we all do, now and then, no matter how we try to veil the fact. If you want proof, ask any sane woman whether she would rather go out to luncheon or to dinner. Granted her sincerity isn't complicated with questionings about a frock, she will declare for dinner, every time. Go in, though. This is most irrelevant. Moreover, by way of living up to my own theory, I'm going to take the time when you are out of the way, to drop in on Mrs. Brenton. Good bye, and—be very good to Reed."

The door shut behind her, and Brenton went on up the stairs, wondering, at every step, what had been the meaning of her final phrase. Meaning it obviously had. Olive rarely talked at random to any of her acquaintances; never at all, it seemed to Brenton, in thinking backward over the way, from point to point, her mind apparently had been marching on beside his own. Did her intuitions never fail her, in the case of any man? Or was it that her clairvoyance focussed itself on him? Did she, indeed, actually comprehend her old friend, Opdyke, one half so clearly as she did himself? Priest though he was, the man in him had an instant of hoping not.

It was now two years and more, since Olive and Brenton first had met. In the forced intimacy of a narrow social circle, they had been thrown together often; the churchly relation between Brenton and his senior warden had increased the frequency. As a rule, the meetings had been at the Keltridges'. The doctor liked Scott; Kathryn did not like Olive. However, though the invitations had been nearly always upon the one side, in any case, hostess or guest, there had been no way of eradicating Olive.

Olive and Brenton, then, had met almost constantly, during those last two years. They had discussed together quite impersonally all things under the sun and above the moon. Their personal talks had been few and very short. None the less, Scott Brenton was quite well aware that no one in the world knew his real self so well as Olive Keltridge. Aware of it, however, he was fully conscious that the fact caused him no regrets at all. Catie, as he still called her on occasion, should, of course, have been the one to comprehend him; but, like the cicada, he merely iterated "Catie didn't." And comprehension is the primal need of every man.



CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Olive found Kathryn Brenton in the extreme of disarray. The littered room was as unlovely as the careless costume, and Kathryn's personal grooming matched them both. It really was not her fault, she explained in fretful apology. She had not expected to see a soul, that morning; but the maid had given warning all at once, really apropos of nothing, and was up-stairs, packing. They were such selfish creatures. It was up and out, at a minute's notice, and you can take care of yourself as best you can. If she had behaved herself, and not gone off in a tantrum, she would have been there to open the door, and then Olive wouldn't have caught her in that old dressing gown she had put on just for breakfast.

All this was delivered volubly in the front hall, while Kathryn closed the door behind her guest and then drew down the blinds, by way of hospitable intimation to any later comers that she was not at home. That done, she led the way into the living-room, while Olive, at her heels, registered her impression of any woman who would be willing thus to present herself above the breakfast table to any man, least of all her husband. However, it was plain that, with Kathryn and her husband, the least of all had become the most, and that, too, at an epoch when, if ever, Kathryn needed to take the very greatest care to fix upon herself the seal of lifelong and admiring devotion. Of course, there might be such a thing as a devotion void of any admiration. Olive Keltridge, however, was not a woman to accept that sort of thing. Neither, she reflected swiftly, was Scott Brenton quite the sort of man to offer it.

Meanwhile, Kathryn, seated in a chair a good deal lower than the laws of perfect grace dictated, huddled her shabby dressing gown about her, ran a vaguely apologetic hand through her puggy pompadour, and went on with her domestic narration.

"It's so queer what sets them off, Miss Keltridge. One never knows when they will fly up in a temper; at least, the kind I seem to get. I never have the luck you do. Why, you have had the same second girl, ever since we moved here."

"The? Oh, Margaret? Yes, she has been with us about nine years." Olive smiled. "She seems almost like a member of the family, by now."

Kathryn shook her head in self-pity. The self-pity loosened a little tail of hair which arose, rampant, from the exact middle of her crown. However, Kathryn lacked a mirror within range, and so she talked on quite as contentedly, despite the waving, waggling tail.

"Yes, so many other people seem to get that kind of girls, so devoted and such competent ones; but, for my part, I don't see where they find them. I pay the very highest prices, and I always look up their references; but they all are just alike. I have had nine different cooks, the last five months, and each one was a little worse than—"

"I met Mr. Brenton just now," Olive cut in, with decision.

"Did you?" his wife inquired indifferently. "I didn't know he had gone out."

"Yes." Olive's decision increased a little. "I thought he wasn't looking very well."

"Scott? Oh, he's well enough. What should ail him?" Kathryn loosened her soggy draperies for an instant, then tightened them in the reverse direction. "He hasn't a worry to his name, hardly a care."

Struggle as she would, Olive knew her accent was becoming more dry with every sentence that she uttered.

"I should have supposed the church—"

"Church? That's nothing. At least, it's only in his line of business, the thing that he set his heart upon and trained for. I wonder what he would say, if he had the care of this great house."

"It is larger than most rectories," Olive made polite assent.

But swiftly Kathryn retrieved her blunder.

"Of course," she added; "I always have been accustomed to a large house. It is only that this one seems to me inconvenient. The back stairs are so very central, and the telephones are so badly placed, one in the study, and the other away out in the back of the hall. Really, you would think, to see them, that the rector and the servants were the only ones to be considered, and not the housekeeper at all."

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.