For the first month and the second, this aloofness came upon Scott Brenton's nerves, and drove him well-nigh mad. Night after night, he tramped the floor, asking himself in vain if such a situation could develop, without some fault upon his side. Day after day, he strove most conscientiously to renew the old relations with his wife. He might as well have tried to exhume his baby son and blow in the breath of life between the folded lips. The one was no more dead than was the other. Moreover, as he had been in no conscious sense the cause of either tragedy, so in no sense could he be the conscious cure. The forces culminating in his present trouble had been set in motion long, long before the hour when Catie had poked her curly head in at the gate. Critical, censorious and selfishly ambitious in her little childhood, her womanhood had strengthened along these well-marked lines, and the lines had led her infallibly into the net of the shallowest, most smug religion that ever has set forth a plausible excuse for total selfishness. Once she was landed in the net, the rest was simple. She was in growing harmony with Universal Mind. Whatever thing opposed her viewpoint was out of harmony, and therefore sinful and laden with incipient disease, curable only so far as it yielded allegiance to her scientific doctrine. And that allegiance Brenton would not yield. In that one matter, he stood firm, albeit he realized but too well that his firmness jeopardized for ever his relations with his wife. After the funeral of their little son, there had been two stormy scenes between them, and then a silence more pregnant of disaster than any storm could ever be. Katharine smiled, and carried her chin high in the air. Brenton's head was bowed between his shoulders; he walked heavily, his eyes upon the ground. Indeed, the two of them were equally lacking in elasticity. Katharine's tension was too great to admit of any margin for spring. Brenton's relaxation was too complete to leave any one aware that a spring ever had existed.