It was an obvious, weighty stillness unconnected with repose.  It seemed as though the spirit of the place were fled, and that in its stead the vacant quiet of death reigned.  In the salon the empty hearth hurt the observer with its poignant suggestion of past comradeship, dead fires, long hours when the spring gales had whistled through the plantation and stories had been told and dreams woven to the spurt of blue and copper flames.  The place had an aspect of desertion; no book lay thrown, face downward, upon chair or table; no flowers glowed against the white walls, though flowers were to be had for the asking in a land that teemed with summer fruitfulness.

This was the salon; but in the studio the note of loss was still more sharply struck.  Not because the easel, drawn into the full light, offered to the gaze a crude, unfinished study, nor yet because a laden palette was cast upon the floor to consort with tubes and brushes, but because the presiding genius of the place Max—­Max the debonair, Max the adventurous—­was seated on a chair before his canvas, a prey to black despair.

Max was thinner.  The great heat of August—­or some more potent cause—­had smoothed the curves from his youthful face, drawn the curled lips into an unfamiliar hardness and painted purple shadows beneath the eyes.  Max had fought a long fight in the three months that had dwindled since the morning of Blake’s going, and a long moral fight has full as many scars to leave behind as a battle of physical issues.  The saddest human experience is to view alone the scenes one has viewed through other eyes—­to walk solitary where one has walked in company—­to have its particular barbed shaft aimed at one from every stick and stone that mark familiar ways.  All this Max had known, wrapping himself in his pride, keeping long silence, fighting his absurd, brave fight.

‘The first days will be the worst!’ he had assured himself, walking back from Notre Dame in the searching sun, heedless of who might notice his red eyes.  ‘The first days will be the worst!’ And this formula he had repeated in the morning, standing uninspired and wretched before a blank canvas.  Then had come Blake’s first message—­a note written from Sweden without care or comfort, importing nothing, indicating nothing beyond the place at which the writer might be found, and tears—­torrents of tears—­had testified to the fierce anticipation, the crushing disappointment for which it was responsible.

He had sent no answer to the cold communication—­no answer had been desired, and calling himself by every name contempt could coin, he had pushed forward along the lonely road, companioned by his work.  But he himself had once said:  ’One must come naked and whole to art, as one must come naked and whole to nature,’ and he had spoken a truth.  Art is no anodyne for a soul wounded in other fields, and Art closed arms to him when most he wooed her.  He threw himself into work with pitiable vehemence in those first black weeks.  By day, he haunted the galleries and attended classes like any art student; by night, he ranged the streets and cafes, seeking inspiration, returning to his lonely room to lie wakeful, fighting his ghosts, or else to sob himself to sleep.