The next day was one of pouring showers.  Twice Lewis left the house, only to be turned back by the rain.  He was not afraid of getting wet, but he was afraid of having to talk to Natalie indoors.  He could not remember ever having talked to her hemmed in by four walls.

But on the morrow he awoke to clean-washed skies and a fuzzy pale-green carpet that spread across the fields and rose in bumps and mounds over trees and budding shrubs.  He left the homestead early, and struck out for Aunt Jed’s.  As he approached the house, a strange diffidence fell upon him.  He was afraid to go in.  For an hour he sat on the top rail of a fence and watched.

At last Natalie came out.  She started to walk toward him, but presently turned to the right.  Lewis followed her.  At first she walked fast, but soon she began to pause beside some burst of green or tempting downy mass of pussy-willow, as though she were in two minds whether to fill her arms and rush back, carrying spring into the house or to go on.  She went on slowly until she reached the barrier of rails that closed the entrance to Leighton’s land of dreams.  Here Lewis came up with her.

“Nat,” he said, “shall I help you over?”

Natalie whirled round at the sound of his voice.  Just for a second there was fright in her eyes; then color mounted swiftly into her pale cheeks, and her lips opened to speak, but she said nothing.  There was something in Lewis’s face that stopped her—­a look of age and of hunger.  She wanted to ask him why he had come back, but her heart was beating so fast that she dared not trust her voice.

Lewis was frightened, too.  He was frightened lest he should find the strange woman when he needed just the oldest pal he had in the world.

“Nat,” he blurted out, “dad is dead.”

When a man thinks he is being clumsy and tactless with a woman, he is generally making a master stroke.  At Lewis’s words, so simple, so child-like, the conscious flush died from Natalie’s cheeks, her heart steadied down, and her eyes filled with the sudden tears of sympathy.

“Dead, Lew?  Your dad dead?”

She put her arms around him and kissed him softly; then she drew him to a low rock.  They sat down side by side.

“Tell Natalie,” she said.

Lewis could never remember that hour with Natalie except as a whole.  Between the bursting of a dam and the moment when the pent-up waters stretch to their utmost level and peace there is no division of time.  He knew only that it was like that with him.  He had come in oppression, he had found peace.

Then he looked up into Natalie’s speaking face and knew that he had found more.  He had found again his old pal.  “A pal is one who can’t do wrong who can’t go wrong, who can’t grow wrong.”  Who had said that?  H lne—­H lne, who, never having seen Natalie save with the inner vision, knew her for a friend.  To Folly his body had cried, “Let us stay young together!” To Natalie his blood, his body, and his soul were ready to cry out, “Let us grow old together!”