His colour came.
"It is the only honourable thing for me to do, Miss Keltridge."
"I know that," she told him, with a swift return to her old downrightness. "And I am sorry for you, yourself. You must have suffered, in this whole thing, a great deal more than any of us know."
For an instant, his gray eyes deepened, burned. He started to hold out his hand to hers; then he checked the gesture.
"I have. It's not an easy thing to do, Miss Keltridge, the sliding out of a concrete and detailed theology into a something that at best is—"
She cut off his final word.
"I know. Doubting isn't so easy as most people imagine it to be. And you—It must have been fearful."
"To have had such doubts?" he assented musingly. "Yes—"
Again she cut him off, this time rather unexpectedly. Brenton was conscious of a momentary wonder whether her sympathy was less than she had led him to anticipate.
"No; to have had such beliefs, in the first place. If only they had been a little milder, you never would have distrusted them. It's nothing but the rasping surface of a creed that sets the doubts to working."