e
approaching ruin of his home; but he only could succeed in thinking
about the passing of his baby boy, about the way the weazen little arms
had shot upward, waving in joyous and insistent recognition. After all
their tedious, aching search for truth, Katharine's search and his, had
it been given to that little child to find out and acknowledge the
eternal verities, hidden for ever from their older eyes?

And, meanwhile, his world was waxing empty. First his beliefs had gone;
and then his baby boy, his hope; and now, last of all, was to go his
wife who should have been his final trust. The past was finished. Ahead
of him was nothing but a lonely road which led nowhere and ended in
nothing. Of what use for a tired man like himself to force himself up
and on along it? Of what use to deny his share of domestic blame,
merely because his intentions had been of the most unselfish? His head
sank lower in his clasping arms.

It was so that Doctor Keltridge found him when, an hour later, he came
marching in at the unlatched front door.

CHAPTER THIRTY

"The thing is amounting to an obsession," Doctor Keltridge told
Professor Opdyke testily, two months later. "I never saw a case of such
ineradicable dubiousness concerning all the things that do not count."

"But the fellow is sincere," the professor urged in extenuation.

"Yes; that makes it all so much the worse, as we doctors are aware.
It's a species of disease, Opdyke, and when a patient takes his disease
seriously, as a general rule it's all up with him. Just how far has
Brenton gone?"

"From our standpoint, not very far; from the standpoint of the student
mind, to the outer limits of agnosticism."

The doctor whistled thoughtfully.

"What a damn-fool he is, Opdyke!" he remarked, with stress upon the
hyphen.

"Yes, and no. If I were going to analyze him, I'd write his formula as
B{_3}M+ECo{_7}, thrice brilliant man plus--and, mind you, the plus is a
serious handicap--an embodied conscience raised to the seventh power.
Brenton is brilliant; but his mind works in a series of swift flashes,
and the flashes dazzle him till they spoil all of his perspective.
Instead of taking them for what they are, mere sparks flying from the
ends of broken mental contact, he thinks that they are errant gleams of
universal truth, vouchsafed to him alone. Then his seven-horse-power
conscience goes to work, and bids him scatter the gleams across a
darkening world. If he didn'