“Whereabouts did ye learn to call it superstition, son?  Not at your mammy’s knee, leastwise,” he said, in sober deprecation.

Tom shook his head.  “No; and not altogether at yours.  But I guess I’ve worked around to your point of view, after so long a time.”

“It’s your mammy’s faith, all the same, Buddy,” said the father gravely.  “Let’s not belittle it any more’n we can help.”

“I don’t belittle it,” was the quick response.  “In some of its phases it is grand—­magnificent.  We can’t always be prying into the cause; the effect is what counts.  And there is no denying that the fairy tale which we call Christianity has built some of the most godlike heroes the world has ever seen.”

“You’re right sure now that it is a fairy story, son?” said the old man, a little wistfully.

“There is no doubt about that,” was the decisive rejoinder.  “There is room for credulity only in ignorance.  Any thinking person who is brought face to face with the materialistic facts—­”

Caleb held up a toil-hardened hand.

“Hold on, Buddy; you’ll have to pick a place where the water deepens sort o’ gradually for the old man or you’ll have him flounderin’.  I reckon I been sittin’ up on the bank all my life, waitin’ for somebody to come along and pole the bottom for me in that pool.”

“No,” said Tom definitively.  “There isn’t any bank to that pool.  You’re in it, or you are out of it; one or the other.  That was the notion I took with me to Boston.  I thought I’d get well up above the eternal wrangle and look down on it—­wouldn’t believe, wouldn’t disbelieve.  It can’t be done.  Jesus, Himself, said, if they’ve reported Him straight, ‘He that is not with me is against me.’”

“Well,” said the father, still deprecating, “that’s some farther along than I’ve ever been able to get—­not sayin’ that I wouldn’t be willin’ to go.”  And then:  “You don’t allow to argue with your mammy about these things, do you, Tom?”

Tom’s rejoinder was gravely considerate.

“It is a sealed book between us, now, pappy.  She knows—­and knows it can’t be helped.  If I wasn’t her son, I hope I should still be the last person in the world to try to shake her faith—­or any one’s, for that matter.  I have merely turned my own back—­because I had to.”

The old man put down his coffee-cup and the look in his eyes was half-appealing.

“What was it turned you, son?—­nothing I’ve ever said or done, I hope?”

Tom shook his big blond head slowly.

“No, not directly; though I suppose a man does go back to his father for a measuring-stick.  But indirectly you, and the other Gordons, are responsible for the best there is in me—­and that’s the questioning part.  Given the doubt, I hunted till I found the man who could resolve or confirm it.”

“Who was he?” inquired Caleb, willing to hear more particularly.

“His name is Bauer—­the man I’ve been rooming with.  He is a German biologist who was to have been educated for the Lutheran ministry.  His people made the capital mistake of sending him to Freiburg for a couple of years as a preliminary, and, when they found out what the German university had done for him, they sent him to Boston, under the impression that the Puritan American city might correct some of his materialism.”