o see him and, so far as our priestly vocabularies will allow, we
help him to swear at the fate that has bowled him over. Nevertheless,
on Sunday morning, we haul out our sanctity and our surplices, put them
both on, and hold forth about Fatherly correction and a lot of other
things that, in our heart of hearts, we don't believe."

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

"I do not."

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

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

"I do not," he said.

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

Brenton's lips stiffened.

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

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

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

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

Brenton nodded curtly.

"That's about the size of it."

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

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

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

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

"Well, yes, a little," Brenton confessed. "It's bound to, doctor. I'm
not agnostic in the least; I believe that any creed has got to be
interpreted with more than a grain of salt, according to one's especial
nature and