alk, you make me feel as though some one
had drawn back the screen from the skylight."

Leighton shrugged his shoulders. For a long moment he was silent; then
he said:

"A life like mine has no justification if it can't let in light, even
though it be through stained glass."

Lewis caught a wistful look in his father's eyes. He felt a sudden surge
of love such as had come to him long years before when he had first
sounded the depths of his father's tenderness. "There's no light in all
the world like cathedral light, Dad," he said with a slight tremble in
his voice, "and it shines through stained glass."

"Thanks, boy, thanks," said Leighton; then he smiled, and threw up his
head. Lewis had learned to know well that gesture of dismissal to a
mood.

"Just one more word," continued his father. "When you do get down to
working with your hands, don't forget repression. Classicism bears the
relation to art that religion does to the world's progress. It's a
drag-anchor--a sound measure of safety--despised when seas are calm, but
treasured against the hour of stress. Let's go and eat."

Lewis rose and put his hand on his father's arm.

"I'll not forget this talk, Dad," he said.

"I hope you won't, boy," said Leighton. "It's harder for me to talk to
you than you think. I'm driven and held by the knowledge that there are
only two ways in which a father can lose his son. One is by talking too
much, the other's by not talking enough. The old trouble of the devil
and the deep, blue sea; the frying-pan and the fire. Come, we've been
bandying the sublime; let's get down to the level of stomachs and smile.
The greatest thing about man is the range of his octaves."

CHAPTER XXVIII

For a week Lewis missed his father very much. Every time he came into
the flat its emptiness struck him, robbed him of gaiety, and made him
feel as though he walked in a dead man's shoes. He was very lonely.

"Helton," he said one night, "I wish things could talk--these old chairs
and the table and that big worn-out couch, for instance."

"Lucky thing they can't, sir," mumbled Helton, holding the seam of the
table-cloth in his teeth while he folded it.

"Why?" said Lewis. "Why should it be lucky they can't? Don't you suppose
if they had the power of talk, they'd have the power of discretion as
well, just as we have?"

"I don't know about that, sir," said Helton. "Things is servants just
like us serving-men is. The more wooden a servin