either by
miraculous intervention, or by thrusting a brake between the cogs of
the revolving wheels of everlasting law. If the baby boy absorbed the
contents of his bottle too fast for his good, he had a wholly
consequent stomach ache. If Reed Opdyke tried conclusions with black
powder and with lumps of loosened rock, he was laid on his back, with
uncompromising promptness. In neither case was there a question of
bringing distress upon the children of men, willingly or unwillingly.
They brought it on themselves; theirs was the fault. As well blame a
railway engine for running over the well-meaning individual who lies
down on the track to rest and meditate on higher things, as blame the
natural law with which men tamper. The All-Wise shows His goodness to
His creatures in that He has laid down law of any sort, not left the
universe to chance and wilful freakishness. As for gospel, the
essential thing to preach was the duty of living according to the law.
After all, it was living, not belief, that counted in the end of
everything.

And, all that spring and early summer, it was living that Scott Brenton
preached. He left to his new curate all the insisting upon proper
points of doctrine. He himself took as his sole concern the thing he
felt most vital, life itself. And, as the weeks went on, perchance in
consonance with his new doctrine concerning man's grip on life eternal,
perchance by reason of his greater enjoyment of life temporal, Brenton
grew stronger, infinitely more alert, infinitely more virile in his
magnetism. The old, limp husk, partly of heredity, in part of starved
existence, was falling off from him. More and more plainly, as it fell,
there stood revealed to all who had the eyes to see, the nervous figure
of the man within.

Even Katharine felt the change instinctively, although, nowadays, she
was too absorbed in realizing her identity with the All-Mind, with
proving that suffering was nothing in the world but absent-minded sin,
to pay any great attention to so concrete a matter as her husband's
improved appetite and better sleep. Katharine, by now, had come to the
point where she was beginning to dispense with the services of Doctor
Keltridge in any minor crisis; and, instead, to sit and meditate upon
the crisis, with a black-bound, fine-print, much-begilded volume open
on her knee. As always, Katharine reckoned shrewdly. If an ordinary
five-dollar copy of her new spiritual check-book upon the bank of