d settled down as close as
possible to the campus. A student congregation might be a bit unstable,
taken as a parish; but it was distinctly lucrative, when it came to the
point of counting up the offertory. Furthermore, as result of its
Sunday-morning habits of arising, it was prone to turn in at the first
church door that offered.

Nowadays on Sunday mornings, Saint Peter's rector had no monopoly of
surplices. The choir, discreetly garbed and outwardly reverential,
warbled early English settings to the hymns, the while they came
striding slowly up the aisle in a species of churchly goose-step that
demanded a pause on each foot, to prevent the physical march outrunning
the musical one. Nowadays, too, there was daily celebration; that is,
when any one was sufficiently energetic to get up and get into church
in time. What happened upon those other days, when the rector was
abandoned to the rows of empty pews, was still a matter of profane
conjecture. Discussed in whispers, it was agreed to be a subject best
left to the disclosing hand of time.

Into this elaborate and decorative harness, Scott Brenton was now
breaking his young strength, his young ambition. In his old parish in
the hills, it had been a question of preaching the best sermons that he
could and looking out for his people in the intervals, rather than of
forms and ceremonies and intonations of the Nicene Creed. In accepting
the Bishop's intimation that Saint Peter's Parish would extend to him a
welcoming hand, he had thought singularly little about the outward
trappings of his priesthood. Catia knew it all; but she held her peace.
The Bishop also had held his peace, and a little bit for the same
reason that Catia had done. He knew the theological history of Scott
Brenton; he knew that, like all half-broken colts, he easily might shy
at first sight of the harness; yet, once with the harness on and fitted
to his back, he would fall to work in earnest and pull steadily with
the best of them. And it was the pulling that the Bishop wished, not
the mere jingling of the farthingale. Under the last incumbent, Saint
Peter's had been running down a little. It was not in all respects an
easy parish; and Brenton, young, earnest and as magnetic as he was
self-distrustful, was the very man to build it up. Nevertheless, the
Bishop saw to it that Scott Brenton should never attend a service at
Saint Peter's, until his acceptance of the parish was settled past all
gainsaying