d quite simply.

His colour came.

"It is the only honourable thing for me to do, Miss Keltridge."

"I know that," she told him, with a swift return to her old
downrightness. "And I am sorry for you, yourself. You must have
suffered, in this whole thing, a great deal more than any of us know."

For an instant, his gray eyes deepened, burned. He started to hold out
his hand to hers; then he checked the gesture.

"I have. It's not an easy thing to do, Miss Keltridge, the sliding out
of a concrete and detailed theology into a something that at best is--"

She cut off his final word.

"I know. Doubting isn't so easy as most people imagine it to be. And
you--It must have been fearful."

"To have had such doubts?" he assented musingly. "Yes--"

Again she cut him off, this time rather unexpectedly. Brenton was
conscious of a momentary wonder whether her sympathy was less than she
had led him to anticipate.

"No; to have had such beliefs, in the first place. If only they had
been a little milder, you never would have distrusted them. It's
nothing but the rasping surface of a creed that sets the doubts to
working."

He tried to conceal a slight sense of hurt beneath his laugh at the
concrete image called into being by her words.

"Like ivy poison, when you rub it, and it spreads? Perhaps." Then
suddenly his eyes went grave. "The curious fact about it all, Miss
Keltridge, is that our beliefs never take half the hold on us that our
doubts do. My inherited notions of original sin and a violent
conversion never by any chance could have upset my worldly advancement.
This last phase of my querying--to phrase it mildly--is going to
overturn my--" And, for the first time in her knowledge of him, Olive
heard his laugh ring bitter; "my whole scheme of domestic economics."

Bitter as was his laugh, though, Brenton's face was only sad. To Olive,
watching him and suddenly grown aware of his weakness, it was plain
that life was taking it out of him rather badly, plain that the man
before her was hungering for comprehension, comfort. What did he get of
that sort, at home?

Once again, at her own question, Olive felt the chasm widening between
them, felt it and instinctively detested it. Still, she could not keep
her mind from lingering an instant on the wonder whether, if Brenton's
wife had been sensitive, unselfish, alert to supply, in so far as lay
within her, the sympathy of which he plainly was in need, the present
crisis