, full of enthusiastic dreams and thrills, and of crushing
disappointments which, however, never completely ended hope. Scott's
heritage from the long line of Parson Wheelers would have made him
stick to the belief that two and two must always equal four, had it not
been for that other heritage which kept him always hoping that some day
or other it might equal five. Already, he was starting on a life-long
quest for that same five, and Catie, nothing loath, went questing by
his side. Catie, though, went out of the merest curiosity, and her
invariable "I told you so" added the final, the most poignant sting to
all of Scott's worst disappointments. At the mature age of six or
seven, Catie Harrison showed quite plainly that no mere longing for a
possible ideal would ever lure her from the path of practical
expediency. She walked slowly, steadily ahead, while her boy companion
leaped to and fro about her, chasing first one bright butterfly of the
imagination and then another, only to clutch them and bring them back
to her to be viewed relentlessly with prosaic eyes which saw only the
spots where his impatient touch had rubbed away the downy bloom.

And so the months rolled past them both, Catie the young materialist
and potential tyrant, and Scott Brenton the idealist. The years carried
the children out of the perpetual holidays of infancy and into the
treadmill of schooling that begins with b, a, ba and sometimes never
ends. Side by side, the two small youngsters entered the low doorway of
the primary school; side by side, a few years later, a pair of lanky
striplings, they were plodding through their intermediate studies which
seemed to them unending. Catie was eagerly looking towards the final
pages of her geography and grammar, for beyond them lay the entrance to
another perpetual holiday, this time of budding maturity. Scott's eyes
were also on the finish, but for a different reason. His mother, one
night a week before his fourteenth birthday, had talked to him of
college, of his grandfather, the final Parson Wheeler of the line, and,
vaguely, of certain ambitions which had sprung up within her heart, the
morning she had listened to the birth-cry of her baby boy.

A week later, she had given him his grandfather's great gold pen,
albeit with plentiful instructions to the effect that he was not to use
it, but to keep it in its box, untarnished, until such time as he was
fitted to employ it in writing sermons of his own. S