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This feeling became so strong at times that he looked up other clues, and at one time tried to find out the whereabouts of the servant girls who had been employed by the Brentons. Curiously enough, the moment he began this search, his mind seemed to become clearer and easier; and when that happened, the old belief in the guilt of Stephen Roland resumed its sway again.
She could have dreamed of another sort of wife for her boy, for Catie's crudeness occasionally irritated her, Catie's self-centred ambition, her intervals of density sometimes came upon Mrs. Brenton's nerves. However, girls were scarce upon the horizon of the Brentons. Catie was not perfect; but, at least, she might be infinitely worse.
However, that there was a gulf, and that an ever-widening one, between them was a fact to which the keen-sighted doctor could not blind himself. He was seeing much of the Brentons, during these winter weeks.
"Therefore, by a process of elimination, it probably is the Brentons you don't want to meet. What is the matter with them?" "Oh, nothing," the girl evaded. "It's only that I hate too prompt a rushing into a new acquaintance." "Not always," her father reminded her. "As a rule, you've been willing enough to meet the new people at the college."
"Not the Brentons, Eva," Catia had only lately forbidden herself the village use of the full name, and her sudden recollection of the fact caused her to speak with nippy brevity; "not the Brentons, but just Scott himself. Of course, we owe it to his cloth." "Yes," Eva Saint Clair Andrews answered, in an appreciative murmur.
She was lonely, she claimed, without her father, restless and nervous from thinking much about the Brentons, wondering what Brenton himself would do. And Reed, who had grown eager at her coming, felt his eagerness departing while he listened to her second reason. Even his courage recognized the fact that there were limits to his strength.
None the less, one did owe some social decencies to one's colleagues of the faculty. Therefore, despite his new-formed porridge metaphor, Dolph trudged away in the direction of the Brentons' home. The new home was a smaller one than Saint Peter's rectory. It stood back a little from the street, under a trio of giant hemlocks which shaded the front verandah and the long stretch of gravelled walk.
He needed an occasional cup of afternoon tea to wash it down. Therefore Kathryn revised her social balance sheets often and with the utmost care. Out of deference to what Kathryn was still pleased to term her husband's cloth, the Brentons promptly had been received into the inmost circles of the college set, an honour which they shared with Prather, the fussy little novelist.
Mother would have insisted on it, anyway; and, besides, Scott's position would make us do it, even if he were the only one to count." Eva Saint Clair Andrews opened her blue eyes a little wider than was quite becoming. "I didn't suppose the Brentons were " she was beginning. But Catia interrupted, with a fresh access of magnificence.
It was a one-sided sort of a discussion, to all appearing. Moreover, from the pitch and the velocity of the voice, Dolph judged the discussion to be largely on the part of the Brentons' most recent cook. "There's no use in my trying to please you," he heard the voice say, as he started up the strip of gravel. "You find fault with everything I do; you interfere with my rights "
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