With palpable regret, Brenton settled back again in his chair. "Oh, well, I'd hate to be disturbing him," he said politely. "Better stay here and wait," Olive advised him. "It can't be long before he comes, and some of those glass pans were very awful." "Do you think so? One never really minds a laboratory smell, after the first whiff of it. It seems to go into the system once for all, at the start. After," this time, the regret was even more palpable; "one always rather longs to get back into it." Olive smiled. "So I have noticed, with my father." Then her accent changed, grew less conventional. "You have had it, then, Mr. Brenton?" "Of another sort. I had three years in a chemical laboratory, when I was in college," he told her simply. "Really? And you liked it?" His voice dropped by a whole octave, thrilled with a new resonance which, for some reason that she could not analyze then or after, set the girl's nerves all a-quiver. It was the voice of a man who, for the first time, is confessing aloud his master passion. "It made life over for me," he said gravely. "Then--Forgive me, if I have no right to ask the question. But one generally keeps on with a thing like that." Olive was painfully aware that her curiosity, however she wrapped it up in apologies, was most unjustifiable. Scott Brenton, however, did not appear to find it so. Too simple-minded and downright to obtrude his personal history, he also was too simple-minded to conceal it. "I should have kept on with it, at any cost," he answered; "only for the sake of my mother. She was a widow without much money; she was giving all she had to educate me, and her heart was set on--something else." If Olive noted the little pause, she had at least the super-feminine tact to ignore it. "Your priesthood?" He nodded slowly. "After a fashion,--yes." This time, the pause seemed to her entirely natural. "She must be very happy now," she answered. "Saint Peter's is a dear old church, mellow enough in its traditions to make up for its hopelessly new architecture; and I am sure you'll love this sleepy town." But it was plain to her that Brenton, quite oblivious to her words, was pursuing his own train of thought. Out of it he spoke. "My mother died, two years ago, Miss Keltridge." Her reply came promptly. "How glad you must be that she lived to know that her wishes had been carried out!" This time, the pause was a good deal longer. Without Olive's in the least suspecting it, the invincible honour of the man before her was struggling with his reticence. Should he absorb a praise to which he had no right; or should he thrust his confidence upon her at this early stage of their acquaintance? Honour won out.