From the park he went mechanically to the flat, and sat for hours by the window looking out upon the dead Sunday gray of London.  Darkness came, and with it Nelton and lights.  Nelton remarked that there was nothing to eat in the house.

“I know,” said Lewis, and sat on, too abject to dress and go out for dinner.  In his depression his thoughts turned naturally to his father.  He thought of joining him, and searched time-tables and sailings, only to find that he could not catch up with the expedition.  Besides, as he looked back on their last days in America, he doubted whether his father would have welcomed his coming.

The next few days were terrible indeed, for Lady Derl, as he had feared, was out of town.  He wrote to her, begging her to let him know where she was and when she would come to London.  For three days he waited for an answer, and then the emptiness of the whole world, the despair of isolation, drove him to his studio and to work.

He had had an impulse to write to Natalie, even to go to her; but there was a fineness in his nature that stopped him, a shame born of the realization of his blindness and of the pity in which H lne and Leighton and perhaps even Natalie must have held him.

Suddenly the full import of H lne’s intimate sacrifice in the disrobing of the palpitating sorrow of her life and of his father’s immolation of his land of dreams struck him.  They had done these things to make him see, and he had remained blind.  They had struck the golden chords of the paean of mighty love, and he had clung, smiling and unhearing, to his penny whistle.

For the first time, and with Folly farther away than ever before, he saw her as she was.  Once he had thought that she and youth were inseparable, that Folly was youth.  Now, in the power of sudden vision, he saw as his father had seen all along, that Folly was as old as woman, that she had never been young.

These things did not come to Lewis in a single day, but in long hours of work spread over many weeks.  He was laboring at a frieze, a commission that had come to him through Le Brux, and upon which he had done considerable work before going to America.  What he had done had not been altogether pleasing to his father.  Lewis had felt it, though Leighton had said little beyond damning it to success.

Now Lewis saw the beginning he had made through his father’s eyes.  He saw the facile riot and exaggerations of youth, and contrasted their quick appeal to a hurried age with the modesty of the art that hides behind the vision and reveals itself not to an age or to ages, but in the long, slow measure of life everlasting.  He undid all but the skeleton of what he had done, and on the bare frame built the progression of repressed beauty which was to escape the glancing eye only to find a long abiding-place in the hearts of those who worship seldom, but worship long.

At last he got word from H lne.  Has letter had followed her to the Continent and from there to Egypt.  She wrote that she was tired of travel, and was coming home.  In a postscript she mentioned a glimpse of Leighton at Port Said.  Lewis was impatient to see her.  He had begun to know his liberation.