oo often walk hand in
hand. Lewis had felt no bondage; consequently his freedom was as
terrible as it was sudden. It plunged him into depths of depression he
had never before sounded.

From the park he went mechanically to the flat, and sat for hours by the
window looking out upon the dead Sunday gray of London. Darkness came,
and with it Nelton and lights. Nelton remarked that there was nothing to
eat in the house.

"I know," said Lewis, and sat on, too abject to dress and go out for
dinner. In his depression his thoughts turned naturally to his father.
He thought of joining him, and searched time-tables and sailings, only
to find that he could not catch up with the expedition. Besides, as he
looked back on their last days in America, he doubted whether his father
would have welcomed his coming.

The next few days were terrible indeed, for Lady Derl, as he had feared,
was out of town. He wrote to her, begging her to let him know where she
was and when she would come to London. For three days he waited for an
answer, and then the emptiness of the whole world, the despair of
isolation, drove him to his studio and to work.

He had had an impulse to write to Natalie, even to go to her; but there
was a fineness in his nature that stopped him, a shame born of the
realization of his blindness and of the pity in which H lne and
Leighton and perhaps even Natalie must have held him.

Suddenly the full import of H lne's intimate sacrifice in the disrobing
of the palpitating sorrow of her life and of his father's immolation of
his land of dreams struck him. They had done these things to make him
see, and he had remained blind. They had struck the golden chords of the
paean of mighty love, and he had clung, smiling and unhearing, to his
penny whistle.

For the first time, and with Folly farther away than ever before, he saw
her as she was. Once he had thought that she and youth were inseparable,
that Folly _was_ youth. Now, in the power of sudden vision, he saw as
his father had seen all along, that Folly was as old as woman, that she
had never been young.

These things did not come to Lewis in a single day, but in long hours of
work spread over many weeks. He was laboring at a frieze, a commission
that had come to him through Le Brux, and upon which he had done
considerable work before going to America. What he had done had not been
altogether pleasing to his father. Lewis had felt it, though Leighton
had said little beyo