His fingers shut quite closely, then, upon the slippery handle of Catia's new bag, and he stepped a bit nearer to her side, as they halted beneath the shining stars, to look back upon what they left behind them. Catia saw the huddled gathering of the village people, already looking a little dowdy to her critical eyes. Scott only saw four faces, grouped in perspective: his mother, tearful, a little tremulous, yet radiant in her full content; behind her, two of the visiting clergy, classmates and chums of the divinity school, and, still behind these two, the eager young face of the curly-headed rector of the many hyphens, the man who first had opened his eyes to a brand-new gospel, one of fatherly affection, not of pursuant wrath, a gospel elastic as the mind of man, plastic as the flowing life of all the ages, not a hard and fast affair whose boundaries were laid down for all time, hundreds of years before. And this was the man of them all, and not the broadcloth village parson, whom Scott Brenton had chosen to pronounce himself and Catia man and wife. Why not? Scott waved his hand. His mother sought her handkerchief, though not to wave it. His two classmates saluted him, the one with Catia's big bouquet, the other with a crochetted "throw" snatched from the nearest chair. Above them all, though, the curly-headed rector flung up his arm in greeting, and with his arm his voice. "Bless you, old man, and keep at it! Remember I'm always in the same old corner, if you ever need me." And Scott Brenton took the assurance with him, as he entered into his new life. CHAPTER EIGHT "Scott," Catia let go the coffee pot and looked up to face him; "I do wish you'd begin to think about smartening yourself up a little." Brenton, who still clung to his bachelor habit of reading the newspaper between swallows of coffee and snatches of toast and jam, looked up at the arraignment which lay in Catia's tone, if not within her words. "Smarten myself up?" he echoed, in blank question. "Yes." Catia put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands around her cup. "I was looking at you, Scott, all the time this last convocation was going on." He smiled benevolently, by way of preparation for flinging himself once more upon the columns of his morning paper. "You'd much better have been looking at the Bishop," he advised her good-temperedly. She shook her head. "The Bishop was all right," she said, with an emphasis so caustic as to catch and hold his attention. Used as he had become, the past two years, to pinpricks of this sort, his colour betrayed how much the present pinprick hurt him. None the less, he still held on to his temper. "And I wasn't?" he queried, with an effort at a smile. "Sorry, Catia. What's the trouble?" "All sorts of little things," she answered, with a disconcerting frankness. "Not any one of them count for much; but, taken all together, they're----" She hesitated for a word. Brenton supplied it.