duties at the college and of the sombre cloud hanging above his home.
All at once, it came to Brenton that the professor himself might also
be a candidate for sympathy, a grateful recipient of diverting
conversations which did not focus themselves entirely upon Reed. The
first experimental visit to the private laboratory proved to be such an
entire success that others followed it until, by degrees, Brenton slid
back into his old fashion of spending many of his odd hours among the
balances and test-tubes, among the old, familiar sights, the smells so
wholly unforgettable.

At any other time, under any other circumstances, the spell of the
place would not have been one half so potent. Now, in the intimacy
evoked by hour-long discussions of their sons' possible futures, the
professor was coming to take a dominant place in Brenton's life. After
preaching what he felt to be unprovable futilities, it was no small
satisfaction to Brenton to come into contact with a man whose sane and
practical working creed was supported by a perfect trestlework of
interlocking equations based, in their turn, on fundamental and
well-proved natural laws. After attributing the erratic courses of
humanity to the caprices of an all-wise, but slightly captious,
Creator, it was very good to sit and discuss them with a comrade who
insisted upon reducing them all to rule and order, who declared, and
also proved past all gainsaying, that nothing ever really happened,
that the very thing which man calls chance is only another name for his
blindness to some link connecting the event and cause. Even the
shrimp-like propensities of his small son. Even the flat, flat figure
stretched out on the couch, up-stairs at home. The Creator did not do
just the thing itself, in sheer and potent wantonness. He merely laid
down the laws. One followed them implicitly; or else, like every
law-breaker, got punished.

And the look of the place; the old, old fascinating reek of it; the
click of glass on glass; the whirring flare of freshly-lighted Bunsen
burners! In vain Brenton tried his best to deaden his senses to the
lure of it; but it was of no use. The charm was in his blood; it would
not down. The smell of hydrogen sulphide was dearer to him than any
incense; his fingers shut upon the test-tubes with a greedier clutch
than any they had ever given to The Book of Common Prayer. And yet, by
some curious mental process, that book of prayer, its age-old
liturgies, nev