cott, a hard and fast monotony would be fatal to
almost any plan.

With Catie, on the other hand, her course was altogether different,
altogether simpler. With the constant and unwavering blows of a
carpenter pounding a nail into an oaken plank, she pounded into Catie's
mind the undeniable truths that Scott's ancestry alone was enough to
fit him for the ministry; that the ministry, granted the sincerity of
its orthodox convictions, may be the highest field of labour offered to
any man. Moreover, to these palpable truths, she added others, a shade
less undeniable. She impressed it on the mind of Catie that Scott's
sole chance of happiness, in this life and the life to come, rested
upon their combined ability to shield him from any adverse influence
which might deflect his footsteps from his predestined goal. She
impressed it on the mind of Catie, also, that it was her girlish duty
to herd her immature companion into the proper fold; that her young and
sprightly charms, her girlish loyalty should be to her as a shepherd's
crook, the guiding wand to be applied in moments of extremest peril.

After her lights, Mrs. Brenton was canny. If she only had been a little
bit more worldly, she would have been a clever woman; moreover, her
potential cleverness had never been one half so manifest as when she
talked about all this to Catie. She did not put forward her urgings
crudely, as for the sake of Scott, her son. Rather than that, she held
them up to Catie coyly, as glimpses of opportunity and power which
waited for her at the gateway of maturity: opportunity given only to
the helpmeet of a man in the commanding position offered by his
ministerial profession, power given to that helpmeet by reason of her
position by his side.

Like the conductor of an orchestra who draws out from one instrument
and then another the varied themes of an overture, so Mrs. Brenton drew
from the unlike minds of Catie and her son the selfsame and
successive themes of what she, in her mother blindness, deemed the one
possible and ennobling overture to Scott Brenton's life. It was quite
characteristic of Mrs. Brenton's make-up, however, that she took no
thought of Catie's life, save in so far as it could be applied to the
ultimate development of Scott, her son.

CHAPTER FOUR

"A puffic' fibbous!" the monthly nurse had announced triumphantly, when
she had presented Mrs. Opdyke's first-born son to his mother for her
inspection.

The phrase,