it was one of the pitched battles that settle
themselves without the final appeal to arms. On that winter night when
Scott had come in, buoyantly alive and hopeful, to be met upon the
threshold by his mother's prayer, the boy had realized that the fight
was on. Next morning, over the plate of sausages, the crisis came, and
went. Contrary to all his expectations, Scott left the table
vanquished, his light of hope gone out for ever. It was a meagre
consolation that, in thinking back upon the matter afterwards, he could
take to himself the credit of having spoken no word which could ever
fester in his mother's mind.

He had gone up to his room to lock the door and then to stand long at
the window, staring with unseeing eyes down into the village street. By
good rights, he should have seen one future, if not the other, opening
out before him in ever-widening vistas. At nineteen or so, however, one
is not too imaginative. Scott merely saw a vagrant dog trying to paw
his way through a deep drift that lay across the road. He had a fellow
feeling for the dog, when he gave up his effort and, sitting down in
the ruins of his tunnel, abandoned himself to the contemplation of a
flea.

After a while, he gave up his moody drumming on the pane, turned his
back to the bleak perspective and, seizing his hat, departed in search
of Catie. He found Catie mending a tear in the new frock she had worn,
the night before, and unsympathetic in proportion to her discontent.
The hollowness of the world was all about him, when he went back to
college, three days later.

His first intention had been to throw over all his scientific study
once for all. Forbidden the whole loaf, why whet his appetite by
nibbling at the one slice offered him? His common sense, however, aided
by the urging of Professor Mansfield, restored him to his reason. Scott
had lost no time at all in making a clean breast of the matter to
Professor Mansfield: his mother's dreams for him, her prejudices, his
own choice and his renouncing of it all for the sake of what his mother
had already given up for him. To his colleagues, the old professor
expressed himself with plain profanity. To Scott, he took a gentler
tone, spoke with appreciation of a mother such as Mrs. Brenton must be,
spoke of the ministerial profession with an admiration he was far from
feeling, and then craftily suggested to his favourite student that the
preaching of the gospel should go hand in hand with scient