Worst of all, the doubtings did not focus themselves upon the solitary instance. They spread and spread, until they honeycombed his entire belief. Was God sometimes a little bit vindictive? Did the All-merciful have moods that would have shamed created man? Did the All-Father now and then punish, out of sheer malevolence, or in an attempt to get even with man for the results of instincts He had put into him at first creation? Was that first creation final in its wisdom; or had it been a partial blunder, needing the interference of a heaven-sent, earth-born Intercessor to set the matter right? Could the All-Wise make a blunder? If not, then why the Atoning Son? In short, aside from some mysterious force which had set certain laws to rolling like mammoth, ever-growing snowballs down the slopes of time and on into a cold, bleak eternity where everything was swept up in their courses, was there ever any-- At this point in his never-ending circle, Scott Brenton usually started to his feet, seized his hat and stick and shut his study door behind him. All out-doors was too small to think in. Violent exercise was the one fit setting for such thought. In the end, though, the wish for exercise only took him down across the valley, and spent itself just as he reached the river's brink. There, on the long white bridge, he stood by the half-hour at a time, his arms folded on the rail, his eyes fixed vaguely on the wintry current, a steel-gray stretch of sliding, slipping water down which the rough white ice cakes came floating, drifting silently, relentlessly, unendingly, to crash against the stone piers of the bridge. In that same way, out of the gray, bleak perspective of his thoughts, the doubts came floating, drifting down upon him with the same relentlessness, to crash against the foundations of his belief. Between the two of them, however, there was this difference: the piers were never chipped or shaken by the ice cakes. He could not say as much as that for his beliefs.