Lewis would have noticed the desertion more had it not been for Natalie.  Natalie claimed and held all his days.  Together they walked and drove till Lewis had learned all the highways and byways that Natalie had long since discovered.  She liked the byways best, and twice she drove through crowding brush to the foot of the lane that was barred.

“I’ve often come here,” she said, “and I’ve even tried to pull those bars down, but they’re solider than they look.  I’m not strong enough.  Will you help me some day?  I want to follow that dear old mossy lane to its end, if it has one.  It looks as if it led straight into the land of dreams.”

“It probably does,” said Lewis.  “I’ll never help you pull down those bars, because, if you’ve got any heart, you can look at them and see that whoever put them up owns that land of dreams, and there’s no land of dreams with room for more than two people, and they must be holding hands.”

“You’ve made me not want to go in there,” said Natalie as she turned Gip around.  “How could you see it like that?  You’re not a woman.”

Lewis did not answer, but when, two days later, they were out after strawberries, and Natalie led him through a wood in the valley to the foot of the pasture with the oaks and the spring, Lewis stopped her.

“Don’t let’s go up there, Nan,” he said.  “That’s part of somebody else’s land of dreams.  Dad’s tip there somewhere, I’m sure.”

Natalie looked at him, and he saw in her eyes that she knew all that he had not told in words.

CHAPTER XLVIII

Leighton and Lewis made two business trips away from the homestead, and on both occasions, as soon as affairs permitted, hurried back with equal eagerness.  Leighton tried to read significance into the fact that Lewis was not chafing at his absence from Folly, but he could not because Lewis wrote to Folly every week, and seemed to revel in telling her everything.  Folly’s answers were few and far between.

Leighton would have given much to see one of Folly’s letters.  He wondered if her maid wrote them for her.  He used to watch Lewis reading them.  They were invariably short—­mere notes.  Lewis would read each one several times to make it seem like a letter.  He seemed to feel that his father would like to see one of the letters, and one day, to keep himself from calling himself coward, he impulsively handed one over.

Leighton read the scant three pages slowly.  It was as though Folly had reached across the sea to scratch him again, for the note was well written in a bold, round hand.  It was short because Folly combined the wisdom of the serpent with the voice of a dove.  She knew the limits of her shibboleth of culture, and never passed them.  She said only the things she had learned to write correctly.  They were few.

The few weeks at the homestead had changed Leighton.  A single mood held him—­a mood that he never threw off with a toss of his head.  He seemed to have lost his philosophy of cheerfulness at the word of command.  Lewis was too absorbed in his long days with Natalie to notice it, but Nelton took it upon himself to open his eyes.