Meanwhile, between the insistent interests that centred in his son, and the persistent efforts of the professor to make good all other lacks, Scott Brenton was finding life a saner and a happier thing than he had ever dreamed. Even his doubtings almost ceased to sting him, nowadays. A Creator whose achievements ran throughout the gamut from the actions of a bit of sodium flung into a dish of water, up to the intricate brain processes of a baby just beginning, as the phrase is, to take notice: surely a Creator capable of that was not likely to bungle His plans and be driven to reconstruct them now and then, either by miraculous intervention, or by thrusting a brake between the cogs of the revolving wheels of everlasting law. If the baby boy absorbed the contents of his bottle too fast for his good, he had a wholly consequent stomach ache. If Reed Opdyke tried conclusions with black powder and with lumps of loosened rock, he was laid on his back, with uncompromising promptness. In neither case was there a question of bringing distress upon the children of men, willingly or unwillingly. They brought it on themselves; theirs was the fault. As well blame a railway engine for running over the well-meaning individual who lies down on the track to rest and meditate on higher things, as blame the natural law with which men tamper. The All-Wise shows His goodness to His creatures in that He has laid down law of any sort, not left the universe to chance and wilful freakishness. As for gospel, the essential thing to preach was the duty of living according to the law. After all, it was living, not belief, that counted in the end of everything. And, all that spring and early summer, it was living that Scott Brenton preached. He left to his new curate all the insisting upon proper points of doctrine. He himself took as his sole concern the thing he felt most vital, life itself. And, as the weeks went on, perchance in consonance with his new doctrine concerning man's grip on life eternal, perchance by reason of his greater enjoyment of life temporal, Brenton grew stronger, infinitely more alert, infinitely more virile in his magnetism. The old, limp husk, partly of heredity, in part of starved existence, was falling off from him. More and more plainly, as it fell, there stood revealed to all who had the eyes to see, the nervous figure of the man within.