man himself. Brenton, on the morning that his child
had died, had lost something which he never would regain. In more
senses than one, his wife and he, henceforward, would be twain, not the
one flesh ordained by matrimony. In the hour of his supreme need,
Katharine had left him and had gone her scientific way. In that hour,
moreover, his little son, pledge of their closest union, had been taken
from him; and Brenton was only too well aware that now no second and
similar pledge would ever be. In the eyes of the world and of the
literal law, Katharine was still his wife. In the eye of the spirit,
she was holding herself as far aloof from him as if their marriage had
never taken place, so far aloof that, nowadays, Brenton scarcely felt
the friction of her presence.

For the first month and the second, this aloofness came upon Scott
Brenton's nerves, and drove him well-nigh mad. Night after night, he
tramped the floor, asking himself in vain if such a situation could
develop, without some fault upon his side. Day after day, he strove
most conscientiously to renew the old relations with his wife. He might
as well have tried to exhume his baby son and blow in the breath of
life between the folded lips. The one was no more dead than was the
other. Moreover, as he had been in no conscious sense the cause of
either tragedy, so in no sense could he be the conscious cure. The
forces culminating in his present trouble had been set in motion long,
long before the hour when Catie had poked her curly head in at the
gate. Critical, censorious and selfishly ambitious in her little
childhood, her womanhood had strengthened along these well-marked
lines, and the lines had led her infallibly into the net of the
shallowest, most smug religion that ever has set forth a plausible
excuse for total selfishness. Once she was landed in the net, the rest
was simple. She was in growing harmony with Universal Mind. Whatever
thing opposed her viewpoint was out of harmony, and therefore sinful
and laden with incipient disease, curable only so far as it yielded
allegiance to her scientific doctrine.

And that allegiance Brenton would not yield. In that one matter, he
stood firm, albeit he realized but too well that his firmness
jeopardized for ever his relations with his wife. After the funeral of
their little son, there had been two stormy scenes between them, and
then a silence more pregnant of disaster than any storm could ever be.
Katharine smile