For a moment Lewis’s face looked blank, then suddenly it flushed.  He turned sharp eyes on his father.

“I left the studio locked,” he said.

Leighton colored in his turn.

“I forgive you that,” he said quietly.  “Just after I came back to town Vi called and told me she had been posing for you.  She said she had left something in the studio that she wanted to fetch herself.  She asked me for the key.”

Lewis’s hands were clenched.

“Well?” he asked.

“I went with her—­to the door.  She asked me to wait outside.  She was gone a long time.  I heard her sobbing——­”

“Sobbing?  Vi?”

Leighton nodded.

“So—­so I went in.”

Father and son looked steadily at each other for a moment.  Then Lewis said: 

“You’ve forgiven me for my thought, Dad; now I beg your pardon for it.  I suppose you saw that that bit of modeling was never intended for the Salon?  It was meant for Vi—­because—­well, because I liked her enough to——­”

“I know,” interrupted Leighton.  “Well, it worked.  It worked as such cures seldom do.  While Vi was sobbing her heart out on the couch, I smashed up the statue with a mallet.  That’s my confession.”

Lewis did not move.

“Did you hear what I said?” asked Leighton.  “I smashed up your model of Vi.”

“I heard you, Dad,” said Lewis.  “But you mustn’t expect me to get excited over it, because it’s what I should have done myself, once she had seen it.”

“When I did it,” continued Leighton, “I had no doubts; but since then I’ve thought a lot.  I want you to know that if that cast had gone into marble or bronze, it would have had the eternal life of art itself.”

Lewis flushed with pleasure.  He knew that such praise from his father must have been weighed a thousand times before it gained utterance.  Only from one other man on earth could commendation bring such a thrill.  As the name of Le Brux came to his mind, it fell from his father’s lips.

“Le Brux has been giving me an awful talking to.”

“Le Brux!” cried Lewis.  “Has he been here?”

“Only in spirit,” said Leighton, smiling.  “And this is what he said in his voice of thunder:  ’If I had been here, I would have stood by that figure with a mallet and smashed the head of any man that raised a finger against it.  What is the world coming to when a mere life weighs more in the balance than the most trifling material expression of eternity?

“‘But, Master,’ I said, ‘a gentleman must always remember the woman.’

“To which he replied, ’What business has an artist to be anything so small as a mere gentleman?  It is not alone for fame and repute that we great have our being.  If by the loss of my single soul I can touch a thousand other souls to life, bring sight to the blind and hearing to ears that would not hear, what, then, is my soul?  Nothing.’”