He stole away. The impatient world had swept him back into its maelstrom of realities. It had taken away his breath and staggered his courage. Hal’s harangue on the consequences of sin had made him see sin everywhere. He saw his father as sinning when he indulged his genius by pushing would-be purchasers down his steps. Hal was right--he and Dearie would have to pay for that; all their lives they had been paying for his father’s temperament. They had had to go short of everything because he would insist on trying to exchange his dreams for money. He wandered out into the garden where his pigeons were flying. Instinctively his steps led him to the stable. From the stalls he dragged out _The Garden Enclosed_, which was to have made his father famous. He gazed at it; as he gazed, the world seemed better. The world must be a happy place so long as there were women in it like that. People said that his father hadn’t succeeded; but he had by being true to what he knew to be best. He climbed the ladder to the studio where, through long years of discouragement, his father had refused to stoop below himself. Leaning from the window, he gazed into the garden. The dusty smell of the ivy came to him. There in the darkness his mother found him. Coming in quietly, she crouched beside him, taking his hands. “Mother, you’re very beautiful.” Her heart quickened. “Something’s happened. Once you wouldn’t have said that.” “I’ve been thinking about so many things,” he whispered, “about how it must have helped a man to have had some one like you always to himself.” “You were thinking,” she brushed his cheek with hers, “you were thinking about yourself--about the long, long future.” “Yes.” His voice scarcely reached her. “I was growing frightened because of Hal. I was feeling kind of lonely. Then I thought of you and Jimmie Boy. It would be fearful to grow up like Hal.” “You won’t, Teddy.” There was a long silence. They could hear each other’s thoughts ticking. At last he whispered, “Desire said she never had a father.” “Poor little girl! You must have guessed?” “Hal?” Choking back her tears, she nodded. “Things like that----” He broke off, staring into the darkness. “Things like that make a boy frightened, when first they’re told him.” She drew his head down to her shoulder. He lay there without speaking, feeling sheltered for the moment. All the threats of manhood, the fears that he might fail, the terror lest he might miss the highest things like Hal, drew away into the distance. In the night, when he awoke and they returned, he drove them off with a new purpose. The pity and white chivalry of his boyhood were aflame with what he had learnt. Until he met her again, he would keep himself spotless. She should be to him what the Holy Grail was to Sir Gala-had. He would fight to be good and great not for his own sake--that would be lonely; but that he might be strong, when he became a man, to pay the price for Desire that Hal’s sin had imposed on her.