d away.

"It ain't never all right," she said half to herself, "when a man
full-grown don't want his supper."

Lewis saw nothing more of his father that night. He tried to keep awake,
but it was long after sleep had conquered him that Leighton came in. And
during the days that followed he saw less and less of his father. Early
in the morning Leighton would be up. He would eat, and then wander about
the place listlessly with his cigar. His head hanging, he would wander
farther and farther from the house until, almost without volition, he
would suddenly strike off in a straight line across the hills.

Lewis would have noticed the desertion more had it not been for Natalie.
Natalie claimed and held all his days. Together they walked and drove
till Lewis had learned all the highways and byways that Natalie had long
since discovered. She liked the byways best, and twice she drove through
crowding brush to the foot of the lane that was barred.

"I've often come here," she said, "and I've even tried to pull those
bars down, but they're solider than they look. I'm not strong enough.
Will you help me some day? I want to follow that dear old mossy lane to
its end, if it has one. It looks as if it led straight into the land of
dreams."

"It probably does," said Lewis. "I'll never help you pull down those
bars, because, if you've got any heart, you can look at them and see
that whoever put them up owns that land of dreams, and there's no land
of dreams with room for more than two people, and they must be holding
hands."

"You've made me not want to go in there," said Natalie as she turned Gip
around. "How could you see it like that? You're not a woman."

Lewis did not answer, but when, two days later, they were out after
strawberries, and Natalie led him through a wood in the valley to the
foot of the pasture with the oaks and the spring, Lewis stopped her.

"Don't let's go up there, Nan," he said. "That's part of somebody else's
land of dreams. Dad's tip there somewhere, I'm sure."

Natalie looked at him, and he saw in her eyes that she knew all that he
had not told in words.

CHAPTER XLVIII

Leighton and Lewis made two business trips away from the homestead, and
on both occasions, as soon as affairs permitted, hurried back with equal
eagerness. Leighton tried to read significance into the fact that Lewis
was not chafing at his absence from Folly, but he could not because
Lewis wrote to Folly every week, and s