ms. 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 hi