hen Brenton curbed his rising excitement. Just as of
old, he felt the overmastering wish to talk things out with Whittenden;
but his maturity shrank from the idea, as the untrained boy had never
done. "Anyway," he went on quietly; "I made my choice. I still believe
it was the best choice open to me at the time. The only trouble is that
I outgrew it."

"Or it outgrew you," Whittenden suggested coolly.

The dark tide surged up across Scott Brenton's lean cheeks.

"Perhaps," he assented curtly. "Still, Whittenden, it doesn't seem that
way to me. I feel myself tied down at every point."

"What ties you?"

"Creeds." Then Brenton laughed a little harshly. "Doubts, rather."

Whittenden looked him in the eyes.

"What is it that you're doubting, Brenton?" he inquired.

"Everything. All the old landmarks of the ages," Brenton told him
restively.

Whittenden smiled.

"You had parted with some of them, when I last said good bye to you,"
he reminded Brenton. "You had quenched the sulphurous flames, and
explained the more surprising of the miracles. You even had a doubt
about creation's having been achieved in one hundred and seventy hours.
What else has gone upon your conscientious scruples?"

"Most things, including a good share of the Thirty-Nine Articles,"
Brenton made curt answer. "Moreover, I have rewritten my early chapter
in the Book of Genesis, until it says _Like unto God, knowing_, not
_Good and Evil_, but _the Law_."

"Hm-m-m!" Whittenden said slowly. "That isn't quite as original as you
may think for, Brenton. A good many of us others have employed that
form of the phrase before. Still, there's no use in taking it for a
sort of cudgel, to knock down the people who still cling to the dear
old phrases. And they are good phrases, too. They deserve to be revered
for their antiquity, and for the hold they have kept upon all mankind;
still I don't, myself, see why you need to take them any more literally
than you do some of those old resonant lines of Homer. It's the spirit
of the thing we're after, not the barren phrases."

"Then what's the good of all your creed?" Brenton demanded shortly.

"Our creed," Brenton corrected him quite gently; more gently, even,
than he had spoken to Reed Opdyke on the night before. Indeed, Scott
Brenton seemed to him vastly more in need of gentleness than did
Opdyke. His trouble was as deep-seated; moreover, it was complicated by
a curious ingrained weakness which, Whittenden ju