all things, even my preaching seemed to her a wretched compromise."

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

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

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

"I wish I knew," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

"Everything, according to his notion. The last I heard, the dear man
apparently was trying to get himself annexed to the literary courses.
He declared in open faculty meeting, the other day, that a proper
training in chemistry would kill off a good fifty per cent of the
modern novels. The authors would realize the explosiveness of their
plots before they touched them, and wouldn't waste months on months of
work, brewing what, in the end of it all, was nothing more than a mere
flash in the pan