When it was at last plain that Gant’s will was on this inflexible, Margaret Leonard had said, quietly:
“Well, then, go your ways, boy. Go your ways. God bless you.”
She looked a moment at his long thin figure and turned to John Dorsey Leonard with wet eyes:
“Do you remember that shaver in knee-pants who came to us four years ago? Can you believe it?”
John Dorsey Leonard laughed quietly, with weary gentle relaxation.
“What do you know about it?” he said.
When Margaret turned to him again her voice, low and gentle, was charged with the greatest passion he had ever heard in it.
“You are taking a part of our heart with you, boy. Do you know that?”
She took his trembling hand gently between her own lean fingers. He lowered his head and closed his eyelids tightly.
“Eugene,” she continued, “we could not love you more if you were our own child. We wanted to keep you with us for another year, but since that cannot be, we are sending you out with our hopes pinned to you. Oh, boy, you are fine. There is no atom in you that is not fine. A glory and a chrism of bright genius rest upon you. God bless you: the world is yours.”
The proud words of love and glory sank like music to his heart, evoking their bright pictures of triumph, and piercing him with the bitter shame of his concealed desires. Love bade him enter, but his soul drew back, guilty of lust and sin.
He tore his hand from her grasp, clinching, with the strangled cry of an animal, his convulsive throat.
“I can’t!” he choked. “You mustn’t think—” He could not go on; his life groped blindly to confessional.
Later, after he left her, her light kiss upon his cheek, the first she had ever given him, burned like a ring of fire.
That summer he was closer to Ben than ever before. They occupied the same room at Woodson Street. Luke had returned to
