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 r