Not in Africa had his father stopped to take on a side-tracked car, but on a day that was already months ago when, standing in a still, deserted lane, he turned to face forever that moment of his life that had nearest touched divinity.

Lewis sat pondering for hours.  It was not grief he was feeling so much as an immeasurable loss.  One grieves at death when it seems futile, when it robs youth or racks old age, when it devastates hopes or wrecks a vision.  But death had not come so to his father.  It had come as a fulfilment.  Lewis knew instinctively that thus and thus only would his father have wished to strike into the royal road.

But the loss seized upon his heart and made it ache.  He thought despondently, as which one of us has not, face to face with the fact of death, of things undone and of words unsaid.  How cruel seemed their last hurried farewell, how hard that his father could not have known that his sacrifice had told for his boy’s liberty, that his wisdom had rightly seen the path his art must follow to its land of promise!  “Hard for you—­only for you,” whispered the voice of his new-found maturity.

It was natural that with reaction should come to Lewis a desire to talk, to seek comfort and sympathy, and it was natural that he should turn to H lne.  He walked slowly to her house.  The doorman turned from him to pick up a note from the hall table.  He handed it to Lewis.

“Her ladyship is not in, sir, to-day.  Her ladyship told me to give you the note when you called.”

Lewis took the note and walked out.  He opened it absently and read: 

    Lew darling, I have heard.  They will tell you that I am out.  I’m not
    out, but I am broken.  I cannot let you see me.  Dear, I have given
    you all that I had to give.

He stood stock-still and read the words again, then he raised his eyes and looked slowly about him.  Street, faces, trees, walls, and towers faded from his view.  He stood in the midst of an illimitable void.  A terror of loneliness fell upon him.  He felt as though his full heart must speak or break, but in all his present world there was no ear to hear.  Suddenly the impulse of a lifetime, often felt, seldom answered, came to him with an insistence that would not be denied.  Go to Natalie.  Tell Natalie.

CHAPTER LIII

Spring was in the very act of birth when Lewis found himself once more in the old carryall threading the River Road.  This time he sat beside Old William, and the horses plodded along slowly, tamed by the slack reins lying neglected on their backs.  Old William was not driving.  His hands, loosely holding the lines, lay on his knees.  Down his pink cheeks and into his white beard crawled tears from his wide blue eyes.

“Glen dead!  Little Glen Leighton dead!” he said aloud from time to time, and Lewis knew himself forgotten.  He forgave the old man for the sake of the picture he conjured—­a picture of that other boyhood when “little Glen Leighton” and the wood-cutter had hunted and fished and roamed these crowding hills together.