t was changing
hands. He made instant apology; but his penitence was forgotten in the
discovery that the curly-headed divine was also an old student of
Professor Mansfield. The rest of the steps were logical and
consecutive, down to those final days of August when together,
hard-working, would-be student and holiday-making, prosperous divine,
they spent Scott's leisure hours afield, talking, talking, talking of
the things one only mentions to one's spiritual next of kin.

Before he left the mountains, Scott's mind was made up definitely to
the step which was next before him. He knew that step would grieve his
mother, would well-nigh break her heart. None the less, he was resolved
to take it. Indeed, in honour, it seemed to him no other course was
open to him, albeit, in his more downright moments, he realized that
the taking it was nothing in the world but a miserable sort of
compromise between his mother's wishes and his own. He had given her
his word that he would be a preacher; keep his given word he must and
would. Nevertheless, preaching, he must choose for himself a gentler
sort of gospel than the lurid, flaming fires delighted in and set forth
with all the cunning of word imagery, by every Parson Wheeler of his
line. His God should be an honest gentleman, and not an all-pursuing
Thing of Wrath.

For some reason he would have been loath to analyze, even to himself,
it was to Catie that Scott first announced his change of plan. Catie
took the announcement tranquilly. To her mind, religion was something
that one put on, together with one's Sunday hat. There was no reason
one of them should be unchanging in form more than the other. One's
theology, like one's brims, should broaden with the fashion; the forms
of worship might as well grow high as the outline of one's hat-crown.
Given the three main elements of best clothes, a Sunday on which to
wear them and an appreciative church to wear them in, and Catie asked
no further consolations of religion. The tolerance Scott liked,
although he deplored the cause.

"Lovely, Scott!" Catie said, with some enthusiasm, when at last she had
grasped in its entirety, not Scott's idea, but the outward form in
which it clothed itself. "You'll wear a surplice, then, and a purple
stripe around your neck, and sing the prayers, like the man I saw in
Boston. He had candles, too, burning at the back, beside a great brass
cross."

Scott shook his head in swift negation. As yet, the hig