“What do you mean?” asked Lewis, troubled.

“Nothing,” said H lne, her thoughts wandering; “nothing that telling will show you.”  She turned back to him and smiled.  “Let’s talk about your pal Natalie.  We’re great friends.”

“Friends?” said Lewis.  “Have you been writing to her?”

“Oh, no,” said H lne.  “Women don’t have to know each other to be friends.”

“Why, there’s nothing more to tell about Natalie,” said Lewis.

H lne looked him squarely in the eyes.

“Tell me honestly,” she said; “haven’t you wanted to go back to Natalie?”

Lewis flushed.  He rose and picked up his hat and stick.

“’You can give a new hat to a king, but it isn’t everybody that will take your cast-off clothes,’ That’s one of dad’s, of course.”

CHAPTER LII

Through that winter Lewis worked steadily forward to a goal that he knew his father could not cavil at.  He knew it instinctively.  His grasp steadied to expression with repression, or, as one of his envious, but honest, competitors put it, genius had bowed to sanity.

It is usual to credit these rebirths in individual art to some great grief, but no great grief had come to Lewis.  His work fulfilled its promise in just such measure as he had fulfilled himself.  In as much as he had matured, in so much had his art.  Man is not ripened by a shock, but by those elements that develop him to the point of feeling and knowing the shock when it comes to him.  In a drab world, drab would have been Lewis’s end; but, little as he realized it, his world had not been drab.

Three steady, but varying, lights had shone upon him.  The influence of Natalie, as soft and still as reflected light; of H lne, worldly before the world, but big of heart; and of Leighton, who had been judged in all things that he might judge, had drawn Lewis up above his self-chosen level, given sight to his eyes, and reduced Folly to the proportions of a little final period to the paragraph of irresponsible youth.

To maturity Lewis had added a gravity that had come to him with the realization that in distancing himself from youth he had also unwittingly drawn away from the hearts that had done most toward bringing him emancipation.  He had no psychological turn of mind.  He could not penetrate the sudden reserve that had fallen upon his father or the apparent increasing distraction with which H lne met his visits.  He did not know that it is in youth and in age that hearts attain their closest contact and that the soul that finds itself, generally does so in solitude.

He was hurt by the long silence of his father—­a silence unbroken now in months, and by H lne’s withdrawal, which was marked enough to make him prolong the intervals between his visits to her, and baffled him on those rare occasions when they met.