As he walked home he felt new to the streets again. They were strange streets in a strange world. But one thing he was sure of; one thing stood clearly out of the puzzle: he must not intrude, must not bother her; must not see her often. In a drama so alien to him he could not act without direction. He knew his own longing too well to trust himself. He sat a long time with his arms clasped across his breast. The anguish in it seemed physical; it was as if a beast were devouring his heart. CHAPTER XXII A REVOLT He turned furiously to his work, but, as the summer came on, he realized that he was working with a desperation entirely heartless. He was not only sure, now, that he had taken a wrong road, but that nameless distress of his lady had left his desire benumbed. A fountain had gone dry in him. At the beginning of the warm days he went into the country on sketching trips with Sydenham. To vales and little rivers north of the city, to flat, green stretches on Long Island, to the Jersey hills, they had gone with sketch traps wherever trolley or steam car could find Nature quickly for them. Ewing had looked forward to this. He had felt hampered in the studio, where he must pass whole days in futile messing with colors, in rash trials of this or that trick of tint, like an idling schoolboy playing with slate and pencil. Once in the open, he had felt, there would quickly show forth those gifts which Teevan was certain he possessed. But day by day these excursions with the old painter had brought him to believe that he had lost his way. That trick of color was not to be learned, it was clear, by rough-and-ready advances. Teevan, who was ever watchful of him, who betrayed, indeed, a strange little jealousy of any other influence than his own, scanned his first studies eagerly, and turned an inscrutable face on his young friend. He did not praise loosely; he did not condemn outright. And he talked not too specifically of the canvases before him. He showed little consciousness of a change in the demeanor of his disciple, though Ewing's eye rested on him with a long, unaccountable regard. Perhaps the boy was turning a little sullen. This amused him. Meanwhile, the youth stood aghast before the dreadful thing he saw in his heart. Hatred of a benefactor! All the good in him struggled against it; all his gratitude pleaded with him to be fair to the friend he had revered so long. Teevan talked more of Corot or Constable, Diaz or Millet than he talked of Ewing; and the young man came at last to the amazing conclusion not only that he was on a wrong road, but that Teevan knew it--that the little man must long have known it. This put him again in that rage of impotence that had seized him in those last days at the League. But he bore it longer now. He felt there was something final about this.