But Olive shook her head.
"No; not that at all. It was one of the Might-Have-Beens, he called you," she said, with brave downrightness. But, afterwards, when she thought the matter over, she wondered whether she had bettered it, or made it worse. In any case, she went on a little hastily. "Since then, as it happens, I never once have been here, when Reed has been at home. Of course, he has been back here now and then; but once I was in London, and in New York, the other times."
"Where is he?"
She shook her head again.
"That is the hardest sort of question to answer, for he is always on the wing. He went in for mining engineering, and is making quite a record as consulting engineer. It's copper, I think, he consults about; anyway, no one ever can predict where he will be heard from next. Really, if you knew him, you must meet Professor Opdyke. The dear old man is bursting with pride in his only son; he talks about him by the hour at a time, if we let him. The trouble is that we all are so cloyed with hearing about Reed's virtues and Reed's triumphs that we have a tendency to run away before the paternal downpour commences. A new pair of ears will be a veritable godsend to his father. He and my father are the greatest sort of chums, and—" Suddenly Olive paused and began to look distinctly uneasy. "By the way, Mr. Brenton, where is my father? I really think that, in mercy to your patience, I'd better go and jog his memory once more."
And jog his memory she did, and with such success that, this time, Doctor Keltridge put in a tardy and apologetic appearance. However, when, smiling guiltily at his own sins of omission, he came to greet his guest, he came alone. Olive, her hospitable duty done, had vanished, to return no more.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Saint Peter's Parish was unique in all New England. The trails of old and new in its experience crossed and crisscrossed at every point, causing a long succession of eccentricities which endeared themselves to the minds of the oldest inhabitants. However, even the oldest inhabitants breathed a deep sigh of relief, when finally they were housed in the brand-new church up beside the college campus, a real stone church, with transepts and painted windows and choir-stalls within, and a cloister and a grand tall tower without. The ramshackle old wooden church had been dear to them, had even remained dear to them after the railroad had laid down its tracks under their very eaves; but they were fretted by the crudely caustic comments of strangers coming to the town, and they were still more fretted when the puffing, screeching Sunday trains drowned the voice of the good old rector whose mannerly traditions forbade his puffing and screeching in his turn.
He had been a dear old rector, rotund and pompous; and his surplice had been fully as long and voluminous as a Mother Hubbard nightie. Possibly it was on that account, to equalize the demand for muslin, that, in those same old days, the choir had worn no surplices at all, but had been accustomed to come tramping into church in all the bravery of sack coats and violent haberdashery. Indeed, upon the part of certain of the congregation, there had been a tendency to regard it as a finger-post to Rome, when some younger member of the vestry suggested putting the ban on scarlet neckties. Saint Peter's Parish was set like a holy beacon in the very midst of a valley which was tainted with heresies Arian and unspeakable, tainted so thoroughly that the ritualistic development of Saint Peter's was delayed for decades upon that account.