How long the fact stays by him is another question. If you
were only a germ, now----" She surveyed him dubiously. "You wouldn't
care to go into the laboratory?" she asked him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olive smiled.

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

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

"Really? And you liked it?"

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

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

"T