Part 44 (2/2)

Leighton's hand fell caressingly upon him. He did not speak until his boy had finished crying, then he said:

”I've told you all this because you alone in all the world have a right to know, a right to know your full inheritance--the inheritance of a child of love.”

Leighton paused.

”I never saw you again,” he went on, ”until that day when we met down there at the ends of the earth. Aunt Jed had sent you down there to hide you from me. Before she died she told me where you were and sent me to you. She needn't have told me to go after you.

”As you go on and meet a wider world, you will hear strange things of your father. Believe them all, and then, if you can, still remember.

Don't waste love. That's a prayer and a charge. I've wasted a lot of life and self, but never a jot of love. Now go, boy. Tell them I've stayed behind for supper.”

Lewis did not hurry. When he reached the homestead, it was already late.

Mrs. Tuck had kept their supper hot for them. When she saw Lewis come in alone, she rushed up to him with eager questions of his father. Lewis looked with new eyes upon her kindly anxious face.

”It's all right,” he said. ”Dad stayed behind. He doesn't want any supper.”

Mrs. Tuck looked shrewdly at him, and then turned 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 seemed to revel in telling her everything. Folly's answers were few and far between.

Leighton would have given much to see one of Folly's letters. He wondered if her maid wrote them for her. He used to watch Lewis reading them. They were invariably short--mere notes. Lewis would read each one several times to make it seem like a letter. He seemed to feel that his father would like to see one of the letters, and one day, to keep himself from calling himself coward, he impulsively handed one over.

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