“Nelton, you can’t go to Africa, not as a serving-man.  You wouldn’t be useful and you wouldn’t be comfortable.  Africa’s a queer place, the cradle of slavery and the land of the free.  A place,” he continued, half to himself, “where masters become men.  They are freed from their servants by the law that says white shall not serve white while the black looks on lest he be amazed that the gods should wait upon each other.”

He turned back to Nelton and added with a smile that was kindly: 

“What would you do in a land where just to be white spells kingship—­a kingship held by the power to stand up to your thirty miles a day, to bear hunger and thirst without whimpering, to stand steady in danger, and to shoot straight and keep clean always?  It’s a land where all the whites sit down to the same table, but it isn’t every white that can get to the table.  You mustn’t think I’m picking on you, Nelton.  The man that’s going with me is always hard up, but I heard him refuse an offer of Lord Dubbley’s of all expenses and a thousand pounds down to take him on a trip.”

“Lord Dubbley!” repeated Nelton, impressed.  “Is there anything w’at a lord can’t ’ave?”

“Yes,” said Leighton.  “There are still tables you can’t sit down at for just money or name, but they are getting further and further away.”

“Mr. Lewis Leighton and servant” attracted considerable attention on the Laurentia, but let it be said to Lewis’s credit, or, rather, to the credit of his abstraction, that he did not notice it.  Never before had Lewis had so much to think about.  His parting with his father ought to have been more than a formality.  Why had it been a mere incident—­an incident scarcely salient among the happenings of a busy day?  As he looked back, Lewis began to see that it was not yesterday or the day before that he had parted from his father.  When was it, then?  Suddenly it came upon him that their real farewell had been said in that still, deserted lane overlooking his father’s land of dreams.

The realization depressed him.  He did not know why.  He did not know that the physical partings in this world are as nothing compared with those divisions of the spirit that come to us unawares, that are never seen in anticipation, but are known all too poignantly when, missing from beside us some long familiar soul, we look back and see the parting of the ways.

Then there was another matter that had come to puzzle his inexperience.  He knew nothing of his father’s theory that there is no erotic affection that can stand a separation of six months in conjunction with six thousand miles.  To youth erotic affection is nonexistent; all emotional impulse is love.  Along this road the race would have come to utter marital disaster long ago were it not for the fact that youth takes in a new impulse with every breath.

In certain aspects Lewis had the maturity of his age.  People who looked at him saw a man, not a boy.  But there was a shy and hidden side of him that was very young indeed.  He was one of those men in whom youth is inherent, a legion that cling long to dreams and are ever ready to stand and fall by some chosen illusion.  Reason can not rob them of God, nor women rob them of woman.