Once more routine fell upon the Leighton household; once more the years stole by.

Lewis’s school days were short.  The Reverend Orme found that he could not stand the constant sight of the boy’s face.  To save himself from the shame of an outburst, he had bought a flock of goats and put Lewis in charge.  Sometimes on his pony, sometimes on foot, Lewis wandered with his flock over the low hills.  When the rains had been kind and the wilderness was a riot of leaf and bloom above long reaches of verdant young grass, his journeys were short.  But when the grass was dry, the endless thorn-trees leafless, and the whole earth, stripped of Nature’s awnings, weltered under a brazen sky, the hardy goats carried him far in their search for sustenance.

When he was near, Natalie joined him as soon as school and household duties would let her.  Those were happy, quiet hours.  Sometimes she brought cookies, hot from mammy’s oven, sometimes the richer roly-poly, redolent of cinnamon and spice, a confection prized to this day, openly by the young, secretly by the old.  Nor did Lewis receive her with empty hands.  One day a monster guava, kept cool under moist leaves, greeted her eyes; the next, a brimming hatful of the tart imbu.  If fruit failed, there was some wondrous toy of fingered clay or carved wood, or, perhaps, merely a glimpse of some furry little animal drawn to Lewis’s knee by the power of vast stillness.

Lewis could not have told what it was he felt for Natalie.  She was not beautiful, as children of the world go.  Her little nose was saddled with freckles.  Her eyes were brown, with a tinge of gold, but they were too big for her pale face.  She was thin and lanky.  Her hair, which matched the color of her eyes, might have been beautiful, but hair done in hard, tight braids has no chance to show itself.  Lewis only knew that even when most grave Natalie’s note was a note of joy—­the only note of joy in all Nadir.  To hear her cry, panting from her haste, “What is it to-day, Lew?  A guava?  O, Lew, what a beauty!” was ample reward for the longest search.

But there were days when Lewis and his goats were too far afield for Natalie to come.  On those days Lewis carried with him sometimes a book, but more often a lump of clay, wrapped in a wet cloth.  He would capture some frolicking kid and handle him for an hour, gently, but deeply, seeking out bone and muscle with his thin, nervous fingers.  Then he would mold a tiny and clumsy image of the kid in clay.  No sooner was it done than idleness would pall upon him.  Back would go the clay into the wet cloth, to be kneaded into a shapeless mass from which a new creation might spring forth, a full-grown goat, his pony, any live thing upon which he could first lay his hands.

Even so, those days were long.  The books he had read many, many times.  Sometimes the clay would turn brittle under the morning sun, sometimes his fingers forgot what cunning they had, sometimes black thought fell upon him and held him till he felt a vague despair.  He stood within the threshold of manhood.  Who was he?  What was life?  Was this life?