Up one flight of stairs, over a tobacconist’s shop, Leighton raised and dropped the massive bronze knocker on a deep-set door.  He saw Lewis’s eyes fix on the ponderous knocker.

“Strong door to stand it, eh?  They don’t make ’em that way any more.”

The door swung open.  A man-servant in black bowed as Leighton entered.

“Glad to welcome you back, sir.  I hope you are well, sir.”

“Thanks, Nelton, I’m well as well.  So is Master Lewis.  Got his room ready?  Show him the bath.”

Lewis, looking upon Nelton, suddenly remembered a little room in the Sul Americano at Bahia.  He felt sure that when Nelton opened his mouth it would be to say, “Will you be wearing the white flannels to-night, sir, or the dinner-jacket?”

By lunch-time Leighton’s high spirits were on the decline, by four o’clock they had struck bottom.  He kept walking to the windows, only to turn his back quickly on what he saw.  At last he said: 

“D’you know what a ‘hundred to one shot’ is?”

“No, sir,” said Lewis.

“Well,” said Leighton, “watch me play one.”  He sat down, wrote a hurried note, and sent it out by Nelton.  “The chances, my boy, are one hundred to one that the lady’s out of town.”

When Nelton came back with an answer, Leighton scarcely stopped to open it.

“Come on, boy,” he called, and was off.  By the time Lewis reached the street, his father was stepping into a cab.  Lewis scrambled after him.

“Doesn’t seem proper, Dad, to rush through a graveyard this way.”

“Graveyard?  It isn’t a graveyard any more.  I’ll prove it to you in a minute.”

It was more than a minute before they pulled up at a house that seemed to belie Leighton’s promise.  Its door was under a massive portico the columns of which rose above the second story.  The portico was flanked by a parapeted balcony, upon which faced, on each side, a row of French windows, closed and curtained, but not shuttered.

CHAPTER XVII

Leighton rang.  The door was opened by a man in livery.  So pompous was he that Lewis gazed at him open-mouthed.  He could hardly tear his eyes from him to follow his father, who was being conducted by a second footman across the glassy, waxed hall into a vast drawing-room.

The drawing-room might have been a tomb for kings, but Lewis felt more awed by it than depressed.  It was a room of distances.  Upon its stately walls hung only six paintings and a tapestry.  Leighton did not tell his son that the walls carried seven fortunes, because he happened to be one of those who saw them only as seven things of joy.

There were other things in the room besides the pictures:  a few chairs, the brocade of which matched the tapestry on the wall; an inlaid spinet; three bronzes.  Before one of the bronzes Lewis stopped involuntarily.  From its massive, columned base to the tip of the living figure it was in one piece.  Out of the pedestal itself writhed the tortured, reaching figure—­aspiring man held to earth.  Lewis stretched out a reverent hand as though he would touch it.