"I hope so, Catia," Brenton responded, still quite gravely. "What is it that you want?" Despite her efforts to the contrary, her voice thrilled with the sudden surety that she had gained her cause. "Write to the Bishop, dear, and tell him you will take Saint Peter's, when he offers it," she begged him. Brenton lifted his head to stare at her, aghast. "Catia, I can't," he told her sternly. Nevertheless, in the end of things, he did. His later self-reckonings were all the more severe on that account. In more senses than one, Scott Brenton's rest-time ended with his turning his back upon the country parish. CHAPTER NINE "Well, what do you think about it, father?" Olive Keltridge queried, as she tapped the table with the corner of the note she was holding in her hand. The tapping, however, was no indication of any filial impatience. It was merely to remind her parent that something was still expected of him, before he drifted off again into an absent-minded study of the medical journal clutched between his fists. Olive Keltridge would have been the last person in the world to dissent from the general adoration of her father. He was all in all to her, as she to him. None the less, she was driven to admit at times that it was a trifle difficult to keep him up to his social duties. Olive's mother had died, six years before. The girl had come out of school to take upon her slim young shoulders the management of her father's house. Moreover, in that aged town where, aside from a few score new professors and their callow young assistants, everybody's grandparents had played dolls and tin soldiers together, Dr. Keltridge's absent-minded fashion of failing to provide his daughter with a feminine chaperon had caused no comment whatsoever. Everybody that one met out at dinner knew all about everybody else for several generations. Either they were indigenous, and born knowing; or else, imported and properly accredited, they took measures to inform themselves at the earliest possible opportunity. All the other people, whom one saw in church and in the street cars, did not count at all. For that reason, no one appeared to find it at all strange that, from the day she put on long frocks, Olive Keltridge should preside, unchaperoned, at her father's table, should receive her father's guests without other protection from their wiles than that accorded by his presence. To be sure, that presence was not invariably dependable. On more than one occasion, Olive had been obliged to delay the serving of the dinner and excuse herself from her waiting guests, while she went in search of her father in his laboratory. The guests, though, as a rule, had known Doctor Eustace Keltridge even longer than his daughter had had the chance to do. They forgot their hunger completely in their amused curiosity as to the condition in which their host would put in his appearance.