St. Kevin had once fallen asleep at a window with his arms outstretched in prayer; a swallow had made a nest in his hand and the saint had waited for the swallow's young to hatch. Kenny, with the legend dimly adrift in his brain, dreamed that he too must wait until a ferryman grew up. He grew up on the further shore to a youth in patches and then all at once the dream became a beautiful delight. The youth by a twist of woodland magic turned to a maid in a glory of old brocade. Such a maid might have stepped from an ancient tapestry to come in search of a knight of old.

"Mr. O'Neill!"

Kenny did not stir. He must keep the dream to the end. If he moved now the maid would vanish.

"Mr. O'Neill!" A hand touched his shoulder.

A haze of old brocade golden in the sunlight retreated and then loomed persistently ahead. The dream if anything became a shade more clear. Well, if a man must dream, let him dream thus, vividly, turning the clock back to maids unbelievably quaint and winsome in old brocade. Sweet as an Irish smile, the face of this one, and as haunting. And beyond, an old flat-bottomed punt and a river, a real river—

Scarlet with confusion, Kenny sprang to his feet. Queen of Heaven! the girl was real. She had stepped from the page of an old romance into life and laughter, wearing for the mystification of chance beholders, an old-time gown of gold brocade! The mystery of her gown, the river setting, the laughing sweetness of her face, rooted him to the spot in wonder and delight. He knew every subtlety of her coloring in one glance. Her soft exquisite eyes were brown. Tragic, they might very well seem pools of ink. Her hair? In the sun there was bronze, deep and vivid, in the shadows brown. And the sun had deepened her skin to cream and tan and rose. Thank God he was a Celt, an artist and an aesthete!

He did not mean to keep on staring nor could he stop. He was horribly disturbed. For he knew the signs as the traveler knows the landmarks of an old, familiar road. Heaven help him, one of his periodic fits of madness was upon him! It could not be helped. He was falling in love again. And he was tragically sorry. Brian would get so far ahead.

Standing there with lunacy in his veins and his head awhirl Kenny looked ahead with foreboding and foresaw days of delicious torment. He knew with the profound and sorrowful wisdom of experience that it would not, could not last. Almost he could have forecast to the day the sad descent into sanity, reactive, monotonous, unemotional, inevitable as the end of the road. But even with his conscience up in arms, he welcomed his surrender. Besides, rebellion, as he knew of old, was utterly futile. He must let the thing run its course.

The thought of flight from a peril of sweetness he banished instantly. To run away was to deny himself the fullness of life men said he needed as an artist. It was unthinkable. Nay, it was unscrupulous, for the greatness of his gift Kenny regarded as an obligation. Besides, Kenny denied himself nothing that he wanted, having considered his wants in detail and found them human, complex and delightful, and sufficiently harmless.

Passionately at war with the new complication in his quest for Brian, Kenny in frantic excitement blamed everything but himself. He blamed the girl. A girl with a face like that had absolutely no right to be loitering in a spot of such enchantment. He blamed the mystery of her gown. Mystery always did for him. He blamed the river and the sylvan wildness all around him and went on staring.

"Please say something!" The girl's laughter had changed to shyness, then to mystification.

Kenny brushed his hair back with a sigh. No fault of his if Fate grew prankish and set the stage with gold brocade and an ancient boat and such a ferryman. He had evoked romance and mystery with the battered horn and he could not escape. All of it had fairly leaped at him and caught him unawares.

"I—I beg your pardon," he said.

"For sleeping?" The girl smiled a little.

"For staring! First," he said, his Irish eyes laughing back at her with the frank charm of a boy begging her to like him, "first I thought you had stepped from a tapestry into my dream—"

The rich hint of rose in her skin deepened. She glanced at her gown.

"Don't tell me about it!" begged Kenny impetuously. And long afterward she was to recognize in that eager gallantry the finest of tact. "It's a delight just to be wonderin'! You called me Mr. O'Neill!" he added blankly.

"Some letters had tumbled from your pocket."

Kenny's brow cleared.

"Besides, whenever the horn blew lately I thought it might be you."

This was too amazing. But the girl's eyes were beautiful, ingenuous and wholly sincere. Dumfounded, Kenny turned away and gathered up his letters.

"Mystery," he said, shaking his head, "is the spice of delight. But I like it diffused. A bit more and I'll be knowing for sure that I'm dreamin'."

"It's as simple as the letters," said the girl, smiling. She drew a letter from the pocket of her gown and held it out to him. He read the address with frank curiosity. Well, thank Heaven, that was settled. Her name was Joan West.

The handwriting was Garry's.

"For the love of Mike!" said Kenny, staring.

"Please read it," said Joan. "It makes everything so simple."

Kenny obeyed.

"Dear Miss West:

"It was like Brian to write so splendidly of his father in an effort to guarantee his own respectability as a suitable friend for your truant brother and fix his identity for the sake of your peace of mind. And I'm glad he told you to write to me.

"Though at this particular minute I would like best to thrash Kennicott O'Neill into work and sanity, I might just as well admit the fact that I'm merely in the chronic state of all men who love him and pass on cheerfully to a pleasant task. All that Brian has said of his father is true. As for Brian himself, he's a lovable, hot-headed chap with a head and a heart and too much of both for his own peace of mind. And he's so darned level-headed and unaffected he needs a Boswell. I hope I've made good.

"The O'Neills, in short, are a splendid pair of fellows with a rush of Irish to the head. They give each other more admiration and affection when they're apart and more trouble when they're together than any two men I have ever known. Personally I think they're miserable apart and hopeless together. However, I'm no judge. Five minutes of concentration on their present problems fuddles my brain beyond the point of intelligent logic.

"I must warn you that O'Neill senior is roving Heaven-knows-where in search of your uncle's farm. Knowing him fairly well I am convinced that he'll rove most of the way in a Pullman, though he distinctly said not. He hopes to find at your farm a letter from your brother that will furnish a clue. Whereupon, I take it, he'll rove forth again to seek his son and patch up a regular ballyhoo of a quarrel that almost disrupted the Holbein Club. You see, everybody insisted upon taking both sides, with terrifying results.

"I pray Heaven that O'Neill senior may not find O'Neill junior, but from now on I shall have a nervous conviction of the pair of them quarreling all over the state of Pennsylvania. In view of a certain sentimental indiscretion of mine in permitting O'Neill to read his son's letter to me and find the postmark, I feel guilty and apprehensive.

"Your brother, I should say, is just a little safer with Brian than he would be anywhere else in the confines of the universe.

"I enclose a newspaper article on Kennicott O'Neill, written just after he had acquired one of the medals that fly up at him wherever he goes. It's fairly accurate.

"Sincerely,

"Garry Rittenhouse."

With the girl's soft eyes upon him, Kenny felt that he could not be expected to read each word of the letter. He never did that anyhow. He blurred through now with amazing speed, catching enough to gratify and upset him. The letter, reminiscent of his penitential quest for Brian, roused voices that he did not want to hear. Nor did he hear them for long. Joan was holding out the clipping, her slender arm in its fall of yellowed lace a thing to catch the eye of any Irishman whom Fate for the good of the world of art had made a painter.

Kenny took the clipping to insure his future peace of mind. Yes, Garry had displayed better judgment than, in the circumstances, might have been expected. The article he saw at a glance was an excellent one and truthful. He particularly liked the phrase "brilliant painter" and hoped Garry had troubled to read the thing through himself before he sent it. It might inspire him to quotation in the grill-room.

Nevertheless, Kenny, with the clipping in his hand, had a picturesque moment of confusion.

"It—it's just the sort of thing we call a 'blurb,' Miss West!" he protested.

"It says in print," said the girl, her eyes wide and direct, "what your son wrote in his letter."

The heart of the lad! Kenny had a bad minute. Until with his quest upon the back of him he remembered Peredur and felt better. Peredur had gone in quest of the Holy Grail. And he had found fair ladies. History, romance, legend, call it what you please, was merely repeating itself with the hero again Celtic and chivalrous.

With Peredur for precedent Kenny laughed softly, his eyes a-twinkle.

"Ah, well," he said with a hint more of brogue than usual, "we've an Irish saying that there never was a fool who hadn't another fool to admire him! Trouble is," he added, saving himself and Brian with a whimsical air of loyalty, "the lad is no fool!"

"It's helped so," said Joan, "to know that Don is with someone like your son. I cried a great deal the first night but the next day there was Brian's letter and Don's. And later this letter and you."

Kenny understood. Brian could thank him for arriving in time. The mere sight of him had certified Brian's respectability and guaranteed the runaway's welfare.

And now—he cleared his throat—now he must ask if the brother had written later and supplied a clue. It was utterly essential. If he had—Well, if he had, he had. That's all there was to it! And he must do some thinking afterward, some painful thinking of the kind that drove him mad. He wondered for a moment, with his fingers by force of habit traveling through his hair, if it really was dishonorable for him to take advantage of Garry's letter to hunt his son to earth. There was a subtlety there in which Garry might be right.

Inwardly in turmoil Kenny took the plunge.

"And you—and you've heard from your brother!"

"No," said the girl sadly. "Not since."

"Mother of Men!" said Kenny softly and drew a long breath. The next step in his quest became all at once amazingly clear. And Kennicott O'Neill was no man to shirk a duty, let John Whitaker say what he chose. He was an unsuccessful parent, please God, trying to make good.

"And I," said Kenny, "tramping the footsore, weary miles always with the hope of a letter and a clue!"

"I'm sorry," said Joan, her brown eyes gentle. "It would have been wonderful if I could have sent you straight to your son and Donald."

"Wonderful!" repeated Kenny with a vague air of enthusiasm. But he rather wished she hadn't said it.

"What will you do?"

"I shall find an inn," said Kenny firmly, "and stay here until you do hear."

"There is no inn."

"Then," said Kenny irresponsibly, "I shall camp here under the willow, buying beans. I have a can opener."

He caught in Joan's eyes a glint of gold and laughter and glanced wistfully across the river at the house upon the cliff. It was undeniably roomy.

"If only your house had been an inn!" he said. "An old, old ramshackle inn, quaint and archaic like the punt yonder and your gown! It's such a wonderful spot."

Joan met his eyes and made no pretense of misunderstanding. She could not.

"Your uncle!" exclaimed Kenny with an air of inspiration and then looked apologetic.

The girl's face flamed. Oddly enough she looked at her gown. Kenny wondered why. He found her distress and the hot color of her face mystifying and lovely.

"I—I know he would!" said Joan in a low voice and looked away. "The house is large. Rooms and rooms of it. And only Uncle and I, save Hughie and his family. Hughie works the farm and lives yonder in the kitchen wing."

Kenny reached for his knapsack and started toward the boat.

"Thank Heaven, that's settled!" he said pleasantly. "You saw for yourself what Garry said about work. Honestly, Miss West, I ought to work. I ought to put in a summer sketching. I can sketch here and wait."

The punt, flat-bottomed and old, he proclaimed a delight. When the girl did not answer he turned and found her staring. She seemed a little dazed.

"I'm thinking," said Joan, her eyes round and grave with astonishment, "how you seem always to have been here."

He laughed, his color high. His face, Joan thought, was much too young and vivid for anybody's father. Their eyes met in new and difficult readjustment and Kenny, his heart turbulent, turned back to the punt.

It was in his mind gallantly to scull the thing across. The announcement brought Joan to the edge of the water in a panic.

"You'd scull us both into a rock!" she exclaimed. "The river is full of them. I know the best way over."

"Professional jealousy!" retorted Kenny, his eyes droll and tender. "I suppose you belong to the ferryman's union." He dropped his knapsack into the boat and busied himself with the painter. "If the boat had two oars," he told her laughing, "or I one arm, I know I could manage. As it is, one oar and two arms—"

"It's much better," said Joan sensibly, "than two oars and one arm. Please get in."

She went to the stern and stood there, waiting, one hand upon the oar. Fascinated, Kenny climbed in.

What a ferryman! he mused as Joan sculled the punt from shore. What a gown and what a background! The old brocade, flapping in the wind, was gold like the afterglow behind the gables and the soft, haunting shadows in the girl's eyes and hair. What an ecstasy of unreality! Boat and ferryman seemed some exquisite animate medallion of another age.

Garry could have told him it was the way he saw his pictures, romantic in his utter abandon, but Garry was not there and Kenny with his head in the clouds rushed on to his doom. The punt was a fairy boat sailing him over a silver river to Hy Brazil, the Isle of Delight. Ah! Hy Brazil! You saw it on clear days and it receded when you followed. It was a melancholy thought and true. The madness never lasted.

There are those for whom the present is merely anticipation of the future or reminiscence of the past. Kenny had the supreme gift of living intensely and joyously in the present and the present for him shone in the soft brown eyes of the ferryman in the stern. Past and future he shrugged to the winds. For he was sailing across to romance, he hoped, and surely to mystery. Yes, surely to mystery! Mystery enough for any Celt in the battered horn, the ferry and the ferryman yonder in the old-time gown.



"It was down there," said Joan, nodding, "where the river bends, that Brian had his camp."

Brian's name was a shock. Kenny came to earth for an instant. Only for an instant. The monochrome of gold behind the gables was drifting into color. Here between the wooded heights where the river ran, already there was shadow. Twilight and afterglow! Kenny in poetic vein told of the Gray Man of the Path. The Path was in Ireland, a fissure in the cliff at Fairhead. If you climbed well you could use the Gray Man's Path and scale the cliff. Kenny himself had climbed it. Joan, busy with the single oar, lost nevertheless no single word of it. She was eager and intent.

"I suppose," said Kenny, "that the Gray Man is the spirit of the mists of Benmore. But to me he's always Twilight. Twilight anywhere."

The girl nodded, quick to catch his mood.

"And to-night," she said, "his path is the river. He's coming now."

Kenny's Gray Man of the Twilight was stealing closer when they landed.

With the feeling of dreams still upon him he followed the girl up the path. It wound steeply upward among the trees, with here and there a rude step fashioned of a boulder, and came out in an orchard on a hill.

Kenny stood stock-still. Fate, he told himself, needed nothing further for his utter undoing. And if she did, it lay here in the orchard. He had come in blossom time.

Well, thanks to the crowded fullness of his emotional life, he knew precisely what it meant. He had adventured in blossoms before to the torment of his heart and head. In Spain. He had forgotten the girl's name but it began with an "I." Now in the dusk he faced gnarled and glimmering boughs of fleece. The wind, fitful and chill since the sunset, speckled the grayness beneath the trees with dim white fragrant rain and stirred the drift of petals on the ground. Stillness and blossoms and the disillusion of intrusive fact!

Joan, lovelier to Kenny's eye than any blossom, seemed unaware of the romance in the orchard. She was intent upon a man coming down the orchard hill. Kenny sighed as he turned his eyes from her.

"It's Hughie," she said. "He's watched for you too since the letter came. We all have. Hughie! Hughie!"

Hughie came toward them, sturdy, middle-aged and unpoetic for all his head was under blossoms.

"Hughie!" called Joan. "It's Mr. O'Neill. He must have some supper. Tell Hannah. And I'll go speak to Uncle Adam."

Romance flitted off through the twilight with her. Hungry, Kenny embarked upon a reactive interval of common sense and followed Hughie, who seemed inclined to talk of rain, to the kitchen door. It was past the supper hour. Beyond in a huge, old-fashioned kitchen, yellow with lamp light, Hughie's daughter, a ruddy-cheeked girl plump and wholesome as an apple, was washing dishes. Kenny liked her. He liked the shining kitchen. The wood was dark and old. He liked too the tiny bird-like wife who trotted to the door at Hughie's call. Her hair was white and scant, her skin ruddy, her eyes as small and black as berries.

Kenny made her his slave. He begged to eat in the kitchen.

Joan found him there a little later with everything in the pantry spread before him. His voice, gay and charming, sounded as if he had liked Hannah for a very long time. And Hannah's best lamp was on the table. There was a pleasant undercurrent of excitement in the kitchen. Joan found her guest's engaging air of adaptability bewildering. He seemed all ease and sparkle.

At the rustle of her gown in the doorway, he sprang to his feet.

"Please sit down," she said, coloring at the unaccustomed deference. "I've a message from Uncle Adam. He understands about your son. He said you may wait here as long as you choose. In any room."

Trotting flurried paths to the pantry and the stove, Hannah at this point must needs halt midway between the two with the teapot in her hand to tell the tale of Kenny's considerate plea for supper in the kitchen. Though it had been largely a matter of old wood and lamp-yellow shadows, Kenny wished that a number of people who had never troubled to be just and call him considerate could hear what she said. Thank Heaven his self-respect was returning. These simple people were splendidly intuitional. They understood. An agreeable wave of confidence in his own judgment filled him with benevolence. He was to lose that confidence strangely in a little while. It came to him sitting there that he felt much as he had felt in the old care-free past before Brian had deserted, plunging him into abysmal despair.

"Perhaps to-night," Joan said, "you'd better sleep wherever Hannah says. And then tomorrow you can pick a room for yourself."

She slipped away with the grace of an elf. Spurred to pictures by the old brocade, Kenny wished he had some velvet knickerbockers and a satin coat. The thought of his knapsack wardrobe filled him with discontent. Hum! To-morrow he must prevail upon someone to conduct him to the nearest village in wire communication with the outside world.

To Garry two days later came a telegram from Craig Farm. It covered three typewritten pages and read like a theatrical manager's costume instructions to a star.

Garry stared.

"Oh, my Lord!" he groaned. "The sister's pretty!"

After a dazed interval, however, he found comfort in the thought that the postmark had been harmless. It had served no other purpose than to lead the penitential lunatic to Craig Farm. He would likely get no further.

"The ties in Brian's bureau," read Garry, thunderstruck at the wealth of detail. "My white flannels. Have cleaned. No place here. Had to ride seven miles with a milk-man to send this—"

Garry ran his eye over the rest and groaned again at the hopeless task ahead. Very well, he decided, reaching for the telephone, if he must invade the O'Neill studio, excavate and pack, Sid could help and Mac and Jan. Waiting, he read the telegram again. With Kenny's usual sense of values there was one brief sentence relative to some materials for work. He left the responsibility of selection there to Garry.

"Work, hell!" exclaimed Garry, provoked. "He wants work so he can fill his time thinking up ways to evade it."



CHAPTER VI

IN THE GARRET

Rain came with the dawn. Kenny, waking hours later with a nervous sense of some unknown delight ahead, found the eaves and orchard dripping. The valley the old house faced was lost in mist.

The blossom storm! So Hughie had called the rain he promised. Kenny liked the name. Out there in the orchard gusty cudgels of wind and water were beating the blossoms to earth. It was a fancy rife with poetic melancholy.

The smell of wet lilac sweeping in from a bush beneath his window made him think somehow of Joan. He wondered in a wave of tenderness if she ferried the river too in storm and, glancing at his watch found the hour disturbing. Unfortunately in a wing remote from Hannah's trot and bustle where save for the monotonous music of the rain, the brush of dripping trees or depressing creaks, there was no noise at all, he had as usual slept too long. And one could never tell. Silas's singular notion of a rising hour might prevail here. Best perhaps to go down a little later and combine his breakfast with his lunch. Meantime he would avail himself of Joan's permission to pick a room for himself.

The house was big and old and abandoned for the most part to creaks and dust and cobwebs. Kenny peered into room after room with a fascinated shiver, reading mystery in every shadow. Thank fortune the room he had was linked to the fragrant life of blossoms and lilacs.

A stairway he climbed came out delightfully in a garret musical with rain and the plaintive chirping of wet birds huddled under dripping eaves. Unlike the rooms he had left below it was swept and clean. There were trunks in one corner, a great many, and a cedar chest. There should be a cedar chest. It was as essential to an old garret like this as violets in spring or sweetness in a girl's face. The chest was open. With a low whistle of delight Kenny peered inside and thought of the ferryman in her quaint brocade. The chest was full to the brim of old-time gowns, glints of faded satin and yellowed lace, buckled slippers and old brocade.

"Mr. O'Neill!"

Kenny wheeled, his face scarlet with guilt and confusion. Joan was beside him, her startled eyes dark with reproach. Even in his stammering moment of apology he was dismayed to find that her gown was commonplace, old and mended.

Joan caught his glance and colored.

"It's the dress I wear to Uncle," she said hurriedly. "I—I meant you never to see it. He doesn't know. Everything there in the cedar chest he hates. All of it belonged to my mother. He wouldn't like me to wear her gowns."

"In the name of Heaven," demanded Kenny, shocked, "why not? It's a beautiful thing—like the play-acting of a dryad!"

"My mother," said the girl in a low voice, "was on the stage."

Her challenging eyes, big and wistful, fanned his chivalry into reckless flame. The need of the hour was peculiar. There was little room for fact. In a moment of wayward impulse he had slipped up a stairway and blundered on a shrine. He must not make another mistake. The girl beside him was as timorous and defensive as a doe scenting an alien breath in the wood of wild things. A wrong step and in spirit she would bound away from him forever.

"Odd!" said Kenny gently. "So was mine." And he thought for a tormented minute of Brian and Garry and John Whitaker. Not one of them would understand. He wanted only to be kind and in tune.

Joan caught her breath. The softness and faith in her eyes hurt.

"You're not ashamed of it!"

"No," said Kenny, looking away, "Certainly not. Are you?"

"No," said Joan steadily. "But Uncle is."

In this second interval of readjustment, yesterday seemed aeons back. They had traveled far. The peace and peril of the moment were ineffably sweet.

"You can be yourself anywhere," said Joan clearly, taking from the chest an exquisite old lavender gown for which she seemed to have come. "And if your self is bad, the—the where doesn't matter."

Her insight rather startled him. Often afterward he was to find in her that curious ability to detach herself from custom and tradition, skiff away the husks of cumulative prejudice and find the kernel of truth for herself.

Joan went toward the stairs; he followed her with a troubled sigh. The stage mother bothered him. With her he had bridged a gulf it would have taken weeks to span, but the trust in Joan's eyes still hurt. If only he could have begun upon a rock, Brian's rock of fact and not the shifting sands of his own errant fancy! It would have been a glory to live up to the faith in the girl's wistful eyes.

He was sorry he had climbed the stairway, sorry he had solved the mystery of the brocade gown, sorry he had lied, sorry, frenziedly sorry that whatever new thing slipped into his life, no matter how simple and beautiful it seemed, took on the familiar complexity fatal to his peace of mind.

But he was passionately grateful for the tense moment when Joan had seemed to turn to him for sympathy, a wild and lonely dryad of a girl in a mended gown.



CHAPTER VII

THE BLOSSOM STORM

At nightfall, with his telegram to Garry depressingly linked with a memory of winding, sodden, lonely roads, dripping woods and the clink of milk-cans, Kenny was summoned to the sitting room of Adam Craig.

A fire burned in the open fireplace. Lamp-light softened the shabbiness of the old room and shone pleasantly on dark wood and a great many faded books. Later Kenny knew that every book in the farmhouse was here upon his shelves. Adam Craig sat huddled in a wheelchair. Kenny thought of the runaway who hated him. He thought of Joan. He thought of the bleak old rooms that seemed one in spirit with the man before him. A wrinkled, evil old man, he told himself with a shudder, with piercing eyes and a face Italian in its subtlety.

Adam Craig looked steadily at the Irishman in the doorway and found his stare returned. The gaze of neither faltered. So began what Kenny, when his singular relations with the old man had goaded him to startled appraisal, was pleased to call a "friendship that was never a friendship and a feud that was never a feud."

"I sent you a message," said Adam Craig.

"Your niece brought it."

The old man tapped with slender, wasted fingers upon the arm of his chair.

"What was it?" he asked guilelessly.

"As I remember it," stammered Kenny in surprise, "you were good enough to say that I might stay here as long as I chose."

"Like all women and some Irishmen," said Adam Craig, "she lied. I said you could stay as long as you were willing to pay."

Kenny changed color. The invalid chose to misinterpret his interval of constraint.

"So," he said softly, "you don't always pay!"

The random shot of inference went home. It was the first of many. Kenny fought back his temper. Affronted, he crossed the room and laid a roll of bills upon the table. Craig counted them with an irritating show of care.

"That, Mr. O'Neill," he said, "will guarantee my hospitality for the space of a month!"

He put the roll of money in the pocket of his bathrobe and Kenny fancied his fingers loathe to leave it.

The drip of the rain and the gusty noise of wind that by daylight had been no more than a melancholy adjunct to the poetry of wet blossoms, became suddenly sinister and tragic and irresistibly atmospheric. Kenny stared with new vision at the dreadful old man in the bathrobe. One by one Kenny was fated to solve his mysteries when he wanted to keep them. He knew now in a flare of intuition why the old rooms had been abandoned, why Joan ferried folk from the village in the valley to the village across the river, why her gown of the morning and the rags of the runaway had been pitifully patched and mended. And he remembered the mystery of her color, when, questing an inn, he had glanced at the house on the cliff and hinted that her uncle might consent to be his host.

"I know he would!" Joan's low voice rang in his ears again with new meaning.

Adam Craig was a miser.

He shrank at the thought. Annoyed to find the old man's eyes boring into him again, he cleared his throat and looked away.

"So," said Adam Craig, "you are a famous painter!"

"I am a painter," said Kenny stiffly.

"With medals," purred Adam.

"With medals."

A fit of coughing seemed for an interval to threaten the old man's very life.

"Yonder in the closet," he said huskily, "is a bottle and some glasses. Bring them here."

Kenny obeyed.

"Sit down."

With the old man's eyes upon him, hungry and expectant, as if he clutched at the thought of companionship, Kenny reluctantly found a chair for himself and sat down. Pity made him gentle. Year in and year out, he remembered with a shiver, Adam Craig sat huddled here in his wheel-chair listening to wind and rain, sleet and snow, the rustle of summer trees and the wind of autumn. It was a melancholy thought and true.

Smoothly hospitable, the invalid poured brandy for himself and his guest and chatted with an air of courtesy. Kenny found himself in quieter mood. Reminiscence crackled in the wood-fire. Nights in the studio by the embers of a log many a Gaelic tale had glowed and sparkled in his soft, delightful brogue for the ears of men who loved his tales of folk lore and loved the teller.

Ah, Ireland, dark rosaleen of myths and mirth and melancholy. The thought of it all made him tender and sad.

Well, he would give this lonely man by the fire an hour of unalloyed delight. He would tell him tales of Ireland when brehons made the laws and bards and harpers roved the green hills. Kenny made his opportunity and began. He told a tale of Choulain, the mountain smith who forged armor for the Ultonians. He told a lighter tale of three sisters whom he called Fair, Brown and Trembling. With the brogue strong upon him he told how Finn McCoul had stolen the clothes of a bathing queen and he told in stirring phrase the exploits of Ireland's mighty hero, Cuchullin.

He had never had a better listener. Adam Craig fixed his piercing eyes inscrutably upon the teller's face, drank glass after glass of brandy, and remained polite, intent and silent. Kenny, with his heart in the telling, went on to the tale of Conoclach and the first harp. Conoclach, he said, hating Cull, her husband, had run away from him toward the sea. There upon the sand lay the skeleton of a whale and the wind playing upon the taut sinews made sounds low and soothing enough to lull her to sleep. And Cull, coming up, marveled at her slumber, heard the murmuring of the wind through the sinews and made the first harp. Kenny liked the tale and he liked the way he told it.

Adam Craig nodded.

"Lies!" he said, springing the trap it had pleased him to bait with an air of courtesy, "All lies."

Kenny flushed with annoyance. The sacrilege of doubt when the tale was Irish jarred.

"Lies!" said Adam Craig again, "adapted centuries ago by some Irish word-thief."

"You are pleased to be humorous," said Kenny, glancing coldly at his host.

"I am pleased," said the old man insolently, "to be truthful, not being Irish. Fair, Brown and Trembling!" he added with a sneer. "Word for word, it's the tale of Cinderella."

"The pattern for Cinderella!" corrected Kenny with a shrug.

Adam Craig glanced at him with narrowed eyes.

"And Finn McCoul and the bathing queen. I can find you the German tale of a stolen veil from which it's—borrowed."

"You can find me likely the name of a German who chose to delve into Gaelic for his plot."

"You've a ready tongue."

"There are times when it's needed."

"As for the first harp," snapped Adam Craig, nettled, "there's a Grecian lyre tale yonder on the shelf like it."

"Liar tale," said Kenny purposely misunderstanding. Hum! The Greeks, he remembered regretfully, were clever adapters.

His air of assurance incensed the old man.

"As for that fool of a Cuchullin," he rasped, coughing a little, "where is he different from Achilles?"

"A little different," said Kenny. "Achilles, poor old scout, was much the inferior of the two."

Again in fury Adam Craig coughed until it seemed that his life must end. Again he drank. Kenny knew by the flurried brightness of his eyes sunk deep in the yellowed gauntness of his face that he was drunk. He shuddered and rose. Already the old man's head was drooping toward his chest in a drunken stupor. With an effort he roused and leered.

"Cinderella, damn you!" he said. "Cinderella and Achilles!"

"Cinderella," repeated Kenny pityingly. "Cinderella and Achilles."

He stood uncertain what to do while Adam Craig slipped down in his chair. Drunk, perverse and cruel! With the rain beating at the windows Kenny thought of Joan, compassion in his heart, and rang for Hughie.

"I—I'm afraid he's drunk," he whispered with a sense of guilt when Hughie came. "Perhaps I shouldn't have given him the bottle."

Hughie glanced at his watch.

"It's nine o'clock," he said. "He's late."

"You mean?"

"Every night," said Hughie. "The doctor gave up fightin' long ago."

Kenny went to his room filled with pity and disgust.

Gusts of wind and rain battered at the orchard blossoms the next day and the next. Kenny found a tuning outfit in a closet and spent his days with Joan tuning the Craig piano. He was grateful in the gloom of dark wood and dust for the fantastic thing of lavender she wore. It was like a bit of iris in a bog, he told her, and was sorry when he saw her glance with troubled eyes at the dust and cobwebs.

The river ran high and brown. The horn beneath the willow was silent. Each night Adam Craig sent for his guest. The rain, he said, made him lonesome. Each night in a hopeless conflict of pity and dislike Kenny went, rain and wind and Adam Craig getting horribly upon his nerves.

He was glad when the sun came and filled the valley, panoramic from the farmhouse ridge, with a glory of light. Milk-white clouds capped the western hills. Nearer, dotted peacefully with farms, red barns and dark, straggling clumps of evergreen, the rolling valley stretched unevenly among intersecting lines of trees. At the foot of a hill rose the spire of the village church. To the south a crystal blaze of sun showed water.

A world of lilac and dogwood and a few late apple blossoms clinging bravely through the storm to sunshine. And the world held Joan with shadows of the sun in her hair and eyes and shadows of the past in her gowns.

Ah, truly, it was good to be alive!



CHAPTER VIII

JOAN

Thus, warm and fragrant, the summer came with Kenny in the house of Adam Craig, drifting pleasantly he knew and cared not where; with Brian on the road with Donald West.

And Joan? To her summer came with a new incomprehensible delight. Out of the void a bright spirit had roved into her world, sweeping her, eager and unresistant, into youth and life and laughter. He came from an immensity of romantic experience, holding out his hands to her, with tender eyes and a look of youth and charm and understanding in his vivid face.

She had fought through drab and solitude to dreams and formless craving, this girl of the hills. What things of vigor her life had known were cruel: a passionate shrinking from her uncle, a fear for the brother who had hotly rebelled at the meager life around him, a loneliness aloof from her kind and a vague hunger for some fuller, sweeter life beyond the hills. And with a blast of a horn the drab had vanished.

There were times when the girl's soft eyes opened wide in a panic of incredulity. He was a famous painter, this Irishman who had prevailed upon her in a laughing moment to call him Kenny; a famous painter with a personality as vivid as his face. And yet he chose to linger at her uncle's farm. The color, the gayety, the sparkle, he seemed miraculously to infuse into existence, left her breathless and startled. And he knew not one spot and one land. He knew many spots, some wild and remote, and many lands. Joan marveled at the twist of Fate that had brought him to the willow.

His individuality made its own appeal. But there were subtler forces working to the girl's surrender. One, a deep abiding gratitude to him and Brian. Though she ran down the lane each morning and peered into the letter box at the end for word of Donald, her disappointment now had nothing in it of terror. Donald, Kenny said, was with an O'Neill. He could not go wrong. She accepted the statement, as she had accepted the stage mother, with utter faith and gladness.

And Kenny was kind to her uncle and to her; kind with an infinite delicacy of tact and feeling. He seemed to understand the instinct for beauty and adornment that sent her roving to her mother's trunks. He understood her dreams and her hunger. He understood the spirit that had led her to make the garret a sort of shrine to be swept and dusted, to be kept apart and precious. There was another force, subtle and exacting: the girl's burgeoning womanhood. Wistful for homage, she craved his gallant tenderness and wanted always to be with him. His frank glance of admiration and his boyish smile were always a tribute. So was his voice, deep, gentle, sonorous as a sweet-toned bell. Tones of it she knew were kept for her alone. The knowledge thrilled her. She did not know why.

By the time the old wistaria vine outside her window shook in the wind with a glory of purple, the over-crowded days were gliding one into the other like a rain of stars. Most of all, wakeful in the dark of her room, she remembered the hours by the river when Kenny wove for her high, peaked hats of rushes such as he claimed the Irish fairies wore, and told her tales of Ireland with a trick of eloquence that made her laugh and made her cry. Odd! unlike her uncle he understood tears too. A tear, he said, was always trailing an Irishman's smile. His sympathetic brogue, smooth and soft and instinct with drollery, held for her a never-ending fascination.

And always at the end of the day there was Kenny's Gray Man of the Twilight stealing up the river all too soon.

Joan was not the only one to whom the sparkle of the irrepressible Irishman's wit and humor was an energizing boon. There was Hannah and Hetty; and Hughie, too, though he stoutly denied it. Life on the Craig farm was no longer dull.

Kenny, at a loose end, kept the farm in ferment, evading the work Garry had sent him, by a conscientious effort to assist others. He was glad he could paint if the mood seized him. Denied the opportunity he knew he would have fretted. There was one singular, inexplicable thing about work. If there was work at hand, one could always find something else to do, attractive and absorbing. If there wasn't work to do, the sheer shock of it seemed to dull you into mental vacuity and loose ends of time came up and hit you in the face. Garry had written something or other like that sarcastically in a letter.

He helped Hannah churn and sang with a soft brogue, to her abashed delight, a song he called "The Gurgling of the Churn." He helped Hetty milk the roan cow and sang while Hetty's apple-cheeks bloomed redder, an exquisite folk tune of a pretty girl who milked a cow in Ireland. Later in the summer he even helped Hughie rake the hay and had a song for that. As Hannah said, he seemed to have songs for everything and what he couldn't sing he could play with dazzling skill on the old piano.

"There's 'lectricity," said Hannah, "in the very air."

"I wished," grumbled Hughie, "he'd put it in the ground instid. The air don't need it. Workin' a farm like this on shares is like goin' to a picnic behind old Nellie and startin' late. You just know you won't git there. What ground up here ain't worked out is hills and stones and hollers."

Hannah sighed.

Kenny knew with regret that he might have been a helpful factor in the work of the farm but for a number of unforeseen reasons. When he churned the butter never came. The roan cow disliked music and kicked over the milk-pail with inartistic persistence. The sun on the hay made his head ache.

As for a picturesque task for which he had no song—well, he had promised Joan to keep away from the punt when the horn beneath the willow blew for a ferryman. He had sculled the old white-haired minister into a rock with delight to no one but Adam Craig, who had spent a whole evening cackling about it. He must always remember that it had not been his fault. The rock had merely scraped the punt while he was listening with politeness to why the old man had "doubled up" his charge and had a church on either side of the river. And if Mr. Abbott had not risen in gentle alarm and begun to teeter around, Kenny in an interval of frantic excitement would not have been forced to fish him out of the stream by his coattails. He considered always that he saved the old man's life. Nor had he meant to dab at him with the oar, thereby encouraging the unfortunate old chap to duck and misinterpret his obvious intention to save him.

But Joan had understood. That was the chief essential. Always Joan was there upon the horizon of his day. Whatever he thought, whatever he did, was colored by a passionate desire for the girl's approval. Her pleasure became his delight; her smile his inspiration. In that, he told himself, pleased to interpret all things here in the sylvan heart of solitude in the terms of romance and mystery, he was like the chivalrous warrior of old who found his true happiness in gallantly serving a beautiful maid. Joan was surely such a type as chivalry conceived. She filled his Celtic ideal and aroused all his gladness as a woman should. And she was as shy and beautiful as a wild flower and as unspoiled. He blessed the old gowns that quaintly framed her loveliness anew from day to day. But they had been his undoing. He felt that he might have kept his head a little longer but for the blaze of the gold brocade in the last light of the sun.

Laughter made her lovely. Ah, there Brian had been right. But then, he reflected sadly, Brian was always right. That, he could surely concede, when Fate had put an end to his quest and doomed him to linger here in the home of a miser, waiting, waiting, yes, waiting in impatience for word of his son. Well, perhaps he was not impatient, but at least he was waiting. And Brian had found in Joan's face the vigor of sweetness, not the kind that cloys. Kenny liked the words.

It was inevitable, with songs for everything, that he would have songs, like the tenderer tones of his voice, that he kept for Joan alone, songs that came softly to his lips when Nature stirred his fancy and Joan was at his side in an old-time gown.

A lone pine, a wild geranium, a lark or Joan's garden where the heliotrope grew; they were sparks to a fire of inspiration that came forth in song.

There was one song he sang most often.

"What is it, Kenny?" Joan asked one sunset when Kenny on the farm porch was finding the subtleties of color for her in the darkening valley below them and the western sky above the hills.

"What's what, Arbutus, dear?" he asked with guile.

The "dear" didn't bother her. It was frequently "Hannah, dear!" and "Hetty, dear!" and Hughie was often "Hughie, darlin'."

"Why," asked Joan, "do you call me Arbutus?"

"Because you're like one," he said gently.

"And what was the song?"

"'My Love's an Arbutus,'" said Kenny demurely. He knew at once that he must not step so far ahead again. She looked a little frightened. Kenny instantly called her attention to a gap in the range of hills to the west.

"Like the Devil's Bit in Ireland," he said. "There the devil, poor lad, bit a chunk out of a mountain and not liking the morsel over well, treated it as you and I would treat a cherry pit."

Joan laughed.

"True." said Kenny, "every word of it. I myself have seen the chunk he threw away. Tis the Rock of Cashel. He's been bitin' again over there, I take it. To-morrow you and I will go down into the valley, seek the unappetizin' rock he rejected and look it over."

"I think most likely," said Joan, "the farm's built on it."

And then the sound of the horn came over the water and Joan ran.

Kenny as usual cursed the horn.

With the valley filled with the first haze of twilight and the hills still aglow, Kenny sat on the farm porch and brooded. He had not meant to frighten her. The Arbutus gallantry he had considered strategic and poetic. There was the baffling thing about her that kept him piqued. She was always shy and elusive. Of convention she knew nothing at all; yet like the shrine in the garret she kept herself apart and precious. Always she seemed fluttering just ahead of him, like a will-of-the-wisp. If he touched her hand ever so gently she drew it away. The caresses most girls he had known would have understood and accepted as part of the summer idyl, he knew, instinctively, would be evaded.

Ah! the truth of it was she was an incomprehensible torment of delight. For she roamed the fields and woods with him gladly, lunched in glens remote it seemed from everything but the call of that infernal horn, yielded to the enthusiasm of his maddest moods, romped with him like a kitten or a child—and kept miraculously the poise and reticence of a woman. She talked freely of her brother; never of her uncle.

He was quick and impressionable, this gifted Irishman, with a trace of the melancholy of his race and all of its cheer. Melancholy was the one mood in which Joan did not seem to flutter just ahead. Always then she followed, gentle, compassionate and shyly tender. He was quick to find it out and wily enough to feign it when in reality his heart was as light and buoyant as a feather.

Save for the call of the horn beneath the willow, the girl was as free to come and go as an oriole in the orchard; for that he was grateful. But whether Adam Craig's attitude was one of trust or cold indifference, he could not fathom. With Hughie and Hannah it was different. They loved Joan and trusted him. That trust, he resolved, should not be futile. He could justify it and he would. Joan, of course, was foredoomed to know the delirium of the heart that had come to him that day beneath the willow. Fate could not deny him requital. She never had. Equally, of course, Joan's delirium, like his own, would not last. It could not. The thought hurt his vanity a little.

It remained for him who had aroused it to linger here at the farm until the fancy had run its course and she was quite herself! Even if, long before, his own madness had waned. That was apt to happen, for he was handicapped by an earlier start. Yes, he would linger. And he would be scrupulous and honorable and kind. Joan was young and a woman. She would nurse the shadows of her summer's idyl long after the idyl was gone, and would mistake them for reality. There with his wider experience and the sad memory of much ebb and now he could be helpful.

Kenny shivered and refused to dwell upon a phase of life that was like autumn and sere and drifting leaves. It bothered him that the thought of Hannah and Hughie had driven him to think it out. He liked best in heart things to think back, not too far, and never forward.

"Kenny!" It was Joan's voice in the dusk.

Kenny forgot the sadness of his wisdom and foreboding. He forgot the future. The thing to do always was to live in the present and now Joan's voice, joyous and young, filled him with tenderness.

"Yes, Joan."

"The Gray Man of the Twilight's here. See, he's climbed up from the valley and he's coming down the walk."

From the Gray Man's misty robes came the fragrance of syringa.



CHAPTER IX

ADAM CRAIG

Joan, Kenny called his torment of delight in days that were exquisite intaglios. Adam Craig was a torment of another caliber. He claimed the evenings of his guest.

Kenny knew too well for his own peace of mind the pitiful diversions of the old man's day. It sapped his powers of resistance. In the morning there was the doctor, a weary little man, untemperamental and mercifully impervious to insult, who chugged up the lane in a car that needed but one twist of the crank to release a great many clattering things. All of them Kenny felt should be anchored more securely. There was an occasional hour in the open. At nightfall he sent for Kenny and by nine he was drunk.

Again and again, wrought to a high pitch of resentment by the traps the invalid baited with an air of courtesy, Kenny cursed his own weak-kneed spasms of pity and surrender and resolved to break away. Always when Hughie rapped at his bedroom door he remembered the melancholy drip of the blossom storm at Adam's windows, the invalid's hunger for news of the outside world and the Spartan way he bore his pain. Whatever the nature of the disease that had wasted his body and etched shadows of pain upon his subtle face, he never spoke of it. Nor did he speak of Donald or Joan, whom Kenny felt despairingly he hated and taunted into secret tears. If he resented the runaway's rebellion, he kept it to himself.

One evening when he seemed to be quiet and in pain, and was taking, Kenny noticed, the medicine that marked vague periods of crisis, Adam said pensively that he had not meant to impugn the Gaelic folk lore. He liked it. It reflected the warm, poetic soul of a people. Brandy, alas, always made him quarrelsome and undependable of mood. When the rain came again and he had to have a fire, they would have more tales of the Dark Rose Kenny loved. Ireland, the Dark Rose! The name was like her history. Yes, folk lore went with the crackle of a log and the mournful music of rain upon a roof. He could have his brandy later.

The rain came with its lonely patter and Kenny told him tales of Ireland, delighted at the sympathetic quiet of his mood. Unbrandied, the evenings, after all, might become endurable.

"You see," Adam said once a little sadly, "without the brandy—"

Kenny nodded his approval.

When the clock struck nine he was in splendid fettle, brogue and all.

"For Ireland's harpers," he was boasting with a reckless air of pride, "were better than any harpers in the world."

"Liars?" asked Adam blankly.

Kenny found his occasional pretense of deafness trying in the extreme.

"Harpers!" he repeated in a loud voice. "And you heard me before."

Adam nodded.

"What do you mean," demanded Kenny suspiciously, "that you did hear me or you didn't?"

"I did," said Adam suavely. "Both times. Go on with the story."

Somewhat nettled, Kenny obeyed. Conscious, the minute he began, of a muffled whistle, he glanced sharply at his host and found his glance returned with a guileless air of inquiry.

"Adam," he said, "are you whistling?"

"My dear Kenny!" protested Adam. "It's the wind. I hear it myself."

Somewhat suspicious, for he fancied now he read in the invalid's alertness a feline readiness to pounce, Kenny returned to the tale of the harper who proved the right of Ireland to lead the world. This time the insolent whistle, louder and a shade defiant, convinced him that his listener's mood had changed. Adam was resenting his guest's insistence upon the merits of his race by whistling "Yankee Doodle."

Kenny stopped and smiled, and the whistle rang out fiercely.

"A good old Irish tune, that, Adam," he said languidly. "It's 'All the way to Galway!' Funny how it came to be known as Yankee Doodle."

In a fury of exasperation Adam propelled himself in his wheel-chair the length of the room and back.

"You damned bragging Irishman!" he hissed. "I think you lie. You're Irish and you hate to be outdone. But I'll look it up."

His spirit was unconquerable, his ingenuity persistent and amazing. Often when the clash of wit was sharp he cackled in perverse delight. But composure maddened him. Again and again, inwardly provoked to the point of murder, Kenny threatened to break away from the goad of his tongue. Always then Adam appealed to his habits of pity and treacherously on the strength of it wheedled him into other tales of folk lore merely to refute them. And always he blamed the brandy. Kenny knew now that he lied. Drunk, the old man was stupid; sober, he was satanic in his cunning.

There was one tale of a fairy mill that, in startling circumstances, Kenny told without interruption. Fairies, in Ireland, said Kenny, had ground the corn of mortals without pay until someone stole a bag of meal that belonged to a widow. Then the fairies, shocked at the ways of men, abandoned the fairy mill forever.

He braced himself for the usual shaft of insolence, in a mood for battle. It did not come. Adam had fallen forward in his chair unconscious. Kenny rang for Hughie and stared at the huddled figure in the wheel-chair with eyes of new suspicion. Adam Craig, he remembered, with a sharp unbridled instinct for adding two and two, was a miser and he hated the children of his widowed sister. There could be a sinister reason.



CHAPTER X

A NOTEBOOK

It seemed that Adam too could add his two and two. In his quieter hours of pain, when every warmer instinct of his guest was uppermost, he was as curious as a woman. His questions, put with the sad, querulous courtesy of an invalid claiming privileges by reason of his pain, were sometimes difficult to answer.

"Paul Pry!" murmured Kenny to himself one night.

Adam's sharp eyes snapped.

"Paul Pry, eh?" he quivered. "You impudent devil!"

"A minute ago," reminded Kenny coldly, "when I told you you were drinking too much brandy, you said you were deaf to-night."

"It's an intermittent affliction," purred Adam with a chuckle. "You struck me in a minute of vacation."

But the careless sobriquet of Kenny's rankled in the old man's mind and bore a startling aftermath of fruit.

Kenny was Irish and conversational. He had as usual talked too much, unaware that Adam, with fiendish insight, was reading steadily between the lines, ready to pounce.

"Paul Pry!" repeated the old man at intervals. "Paul Pry! You are a selfish, hair-brained Irishman," he blazed suddenly, leaning forward, baleful and intense. "Some men feel and some men act. But you act only when you have to. Life's a battle. Do you fight? No! You glide along and watch the others. That's the way you've kept your youth. You never linger on the things that prove unpleasant. You think life an individual adventure to be lived the way you choose. It isn't. It's a link in a chain that clanks. You can't escape. You won't escape. You're a play-actor with a gift for staging yourself and you're as hungry for the limelight as a circus girl in spangles. What you need is the hurt of sacrifice. You need to suffer and forget yourself. Damn you and your brogue and your folk lore. You're the most amazing liar I've ever met."

But Kenny heard no more. He stumbled out of the sitting room and slammed the door.

There was a lamp burning in his bedroom. Kenny walked the floor in anger and humiliation, his fingers clenched as usual in his hair. Back there in the studio with Whitaker's arraignment ringing in his ears, he had been conscious of a terror he refused to face, a curious inner crash of something vital to his peace of mind. And he had fought it back for days, plunging into the relief of penance with a gasp of hot content.

Now Adam, sitting in separate judgment, had reached out into the void and linked himself to Whitaker—to Brian, to Garry—and his barbs stung. That terror of misgiving, lulled into quietude here in the peace and charm of his life with Joan, stirred within him hydra-headed and drove the color from his face. Then he blazed into rebellion.

Failure! Vanity! Self! And Adam to-night had fused the verdict of the other three.

Whether or not these things were true was at first of little moment. The sting lay in the fact that someone had troubled to think them. The careless illusion, that what he thought of himself the world thought, lay at his feet pricked into utter collapse. It seemed to him as he walked the floor in a tumult of hurt pride, that the world must accept the man he knew himself to be, the man whose light-hearted existence he loved to dramatize, a brilliant painter with piquant imperfections, intensely human and delightful. He passionately demanded that it accept him so without question. Good God! No one had seemed to question until Brian in a burst of temper had brought the world about his ears.

Well, let the world misjudge him if it chose. He was big enough, he knew, to hold his head above it.

In a mood of lively irony he whipped forth a notebook and wrote a sarcastic summary of his shortcomings, his lips curled in hostile interest.

"Sunsets and vanity," he wrote with a flourish and lost his temper. Well, that phase in Brian's life was closed forever, thanks to Whitaker's meddling tongue. Never again would Kenny lay himself open to misinterpretation by seeking commissions for his son. Brian could write truth for Whitaker with a blue pencil and be damned!

"Hairbrained, unquenchable youth," he wrote next and added airily after this: "This is likely hair and teeth."

"Irresponsible."

"Failure as a parent." This he underlined.

"Need to suffer and learn something of the psychology of sacrifice."

"Romantic attitude toward the truth."

"Improvidence. Need for plebeian regularity in money affairs and petty debt."

"Disorder—chairs to sit down on without looking first."

"I borrow Brian's money and his clothes."

"Pawned shotgun, tennis racket, some fishing tackle and golf clubs."

"Note: Look over tickets."

"A tendency to indolence."

He had begun with an air of bored amusement; he finished grimly, read and reread. In the light of the Craig-and-Whitaker analysis, which dovetailed in the similarity of their venom, the details might, he fancied with a lifting of his brows, be classified under three general headings: youth, irresponsibility and a romantic attitude toward the truth.

The envious charge of youth he attributed instantly to the thinning of John Whitaker's grayish hair, and felt better. In irresponsibility he read, agreeably, needful temperament. And his romantic attitude toward the truth was merely a brilliant overplus of imagination without which life would be insufferably dull.

He read the list again with colors flying and drum beating victory. Though singly he could refute each item, an unguarded perusal when he felt complacent, brought the hot blood back to his face in a rush of mortification and dismay.

With a curse he flung the book across the room. Then unreasonably he went after it and wrote at the end: "Life is a battle. I do not fight. And life is not an individual adventure."

The final sentence startled him most of all.

Again he read it all and the memory of Brian, white, aggressive, desperately intent upon escape, came between him and his quest of self-content. It always bothered him. It had driven him to hunt the psaltery stick, repent his lie to Garry and water the fern. It had driven him out upon the road. Mocking voices rose now from the depths. Was it—could it all be true? The shock of the thought was cataclysmic and he longed for the self-respect and confidence in which he had basked that night in Hannah's kitchen. Must the world side with Brian? He was sorry about the shotgun. He was sorry about the sunsets. By the Blessed Bell of Clare, he was willing to be sorry about anything, little as he felt himself to blame. Was he to blame? Had he not paid for it all in his days of stormy penance?

Out of his white-hot revolt clear vision came to him, as it sometimes did, with incomprehensible, dart-like swiftness, and leveled him to the dust. Some of it he would not face but he saw his days upon the road with truth and shame. He had failed in his penance. Garry was right. He did everything by fits and starts. And he could justify whatever was most conducive to his comfort and his inclination. His pilgrimage had been farcical. He had fled from discomfort, magnifying pettiness into tragedy. And he had been disloyal to the son he loved. For there under the willow when his startled eyes had found Joan, he had passionately made up his mind to linger. Nay more, even then in the dim recesses of his mind, he had hoped there would be no clue to send him forth again in quest of Brian. And if there had been, Kenny faced the fact that he would not have gone. . . . No, he would not have gone. . . . And Adam Craig was a vulture preying upon the unrest in his heart that he had hoped to stifle.

He went downstairs with a shudder, craving stars and darkness, unbolted the front door and went out upon the porch.

The valley was black. Its lonely points of light vanished early. Up here on the ridge there was wind and quiet. He peopled the gulf of blackness ahead with things sinister and evil in spirit like Adam Craig and turned his back upon it with a shiver. There would be peace in the voice of the river.

The starlight, dim and soft, had a sense of silver in its indistinctness. To Kenny, walking through the orchard, ghosts of blossoms blew fragrantly above his head. The blossoms were gone like his peace of mind. He hungered for Joan.

In the velvet dimness the wistaria vine beneath her window loomed forth like a shower of shadow; a grotesque ladder of bloom warm to his mind with invisible color and yet darker to his eye than the night with its silver sheen of stars.

A ladder? Kenny caught his breath and stood still, quite still. It was a ladder. Some one was climbing down. Branch after branch the climber touched with unerring instinct and ran off noiselessly through the orchard to the south.

Kenny's heart throbbed with a ghastly fear.

It was Joan.

He knew what lay to the south beyond the orchard: woodlands and wildness, nothing else. The fields Hughie cultivated stretched to the north from the kitchen windows. There in the forest to the south where the river curved off at a tangent and flowed directly east, Brian had had his camp. On farther Joan had never cared to go. Where did she go now in the starlit darkness, climbing down the wistaria ladder with a cloak around her shoulders? To what did she venture through the solitude of whispering trees and the gloom of the pine forest?

A lover's tryst? Kenny sickened and choked. He could not follow her. He would not.

He turned back instead and went to bed to lie wakeful until dawn with something new and horrible gnawing at his heartstrings. Then he fell asleep and dreamed of monsters.



CHAPTER XI

THE CABIN IN THE PINES

He did not mean to go again. He did not mean to watch the wistaria vine. He went, he told himself wildly, to evade the summons that was sure to come from Adam Craig. But when the glimmer of wistaria swayed beneath a footfall, madness came upon him and he went stealthily through orchard and forest, stalking the flutter of a cloak.

The river turned. Joan followed the bend for a little way and struck off again into the thick of the forest through the cloistered gloom of many pines. She came, after what seemed to Kenny a long, long time, to a rude cabin made of logs. There was a light in the window. Joan opened the door and disappeared.

If he had known definitely what he thought, he told himself with an Irish twist, the agony of his suspense would have been worse and less. The sharp intensity of the pain in his heart terrified him. Whatever lay in the cabin of logs was something apart from him. The night noises of the forest blared strangely in his ears. He was conscious of the odor of pines; conscious of a shower of pine-needles when he brushed back against a tree. And there were cones beneath his feet. But his madness would not bear him on to the cabin door. At intervals with fire in his brain he knew he heard the voice of a man.

In a vague eternity of minutes he waited until the door opened and lamplight streamed brightly over the sill. A man stepped forth. Something seemed to snap in Kenny's heart. Relief roared in his ears and rushed unbidden to his lips.

"Oh, my God!" he gasped.

It was the gentle, white-haired minister with a book beneath his arm.

Startled the old man drew back and peered uncertainly into the darkness. Kenny approached.

"I—I beg your pardon," he said, wiping his forehead. "I'm sorry."

Joan came to the door and stared.

"Kenny!" she exclaimed. And her voice had in it a note of distress. She glanced at Mr. Abbott, who glanced in turn at Kenny with an air of gentle inquiry. His confidence in Mr. O'Neill, never very robust, had waned that day upon the river. It was weakening more and more.

Tongue-tied and scarlet, Kenny stared into the cabin. Its single room with its raftered walls, books and a lamp, an old-fashioned stove, a work-basket, a faded rag-carpet and the trophies of childhood, boy and girl, was snug and comfortable.

"It's Donald's and mine," said Joan. "We've always studied here with Mr. Abbott."

"Mr. O'Neill," said the minister stiffly, "it—it has been a sort of secret. Mr. Craig was strangely opposed to the tuition I offered years ago. Joan settled the problem for herself."

It was evident all of it had lain a little sorely on the old man's conscience. It had been a singular problem, deception or the welfare of the two children suffering at the hands of Adam Craig; and the need of choice had driven him to prayer.

Kenny, glad at last to find his tongue, warmly commended his decision.

Joan blew out the light and locked the door.

"How did you find the cabin, Kenny?" she asked wonderingly. "It's off so in the wilder part of the forest. No one comes this way."

Kenny told fluently of walking toward a star.

It was like him. Joan smiled.

But the faith in her eyes upset him. He wanted to be truthful. Ah! if only Fate would let him!

"And I startled you!" marveled Mr. Abbott.

"Yes," said Kenny.

He walked back through the silence of the pines with remorse in his heart, paying little heed to Mr. Abbott's talk of vacation. The wistaria ladder, the cloister of pines, the lonely cabin where Joan spent truant hours of peace, were to him things of infinite pathos. And like the day in the garret, yesterday seemed aeons back. He wondered why, conscious of a subtle, unforgettable sense of change in himself. Something mysteriously had altered.

The memory of the pain and horror in his heart, he dismissed with a frown. As Adam said, he never dwelt upon the things that failed to please him. The pain was past. The peace of the present lay in his heart. It had even crowded out the memory of Adam and the notebook.

He was glad when Mr. Abbott said good night and took a footpath to the west. Well, it had been a mystery this time that he hadn't wanted to keep. But why, Oh, why, he wondered a little sadly, must all his mysteries end in anticlimax? Absurd, the little man in his frock coat trotting out of the cabin door!

"Joan, Joan!" he pleaded. "Why didn't you tell me? Am I then not your friend?"

"I'm sorry, Kenny." She laid her hand wistfully upon his arm. "Mr. Abbott asked me not to tell you."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

"You go there often?"

"Yes, at night. I sew there and read and study. To Donald and me it was always a little like a home. I used to patch his clothes there. He hated them so. You're not hurt?"

"Not—now."

"I'm glad."

At the wistaria ladder Kenny sighed.

"Must you?" he asked. "I mean, Joan, can't you steal in by the door?"

"It's better not," said Joan, one hand already on the vine. "Hughie would scold if he knew. For the wood is lonely. And he would talk so much of rain and snow. Now I can come and go as I please."

She caught her cloak up and fastened it to insure the freedom of both her hands.

"Good night, Kenny," she said shyly. "I hope you find your star."

"I did," said Kenny. "'Twas hiding in a cabin. Good night, dear."



CHAPTER XII

THRALDOM

Hughie met him at the door.

"He's been askin' for you, Mr. O'Neill," he said. "And he hasn't drank a drop all evening."

"I shan't go," said Kenny. "Depend upon it, Hughie, it's another trick."

"I don't know," said Hughie hopelessly. "It may be. It's not for me to deny, with all you take from him." Hughie looked ashamed of himself. "I—I'm sorry for him."

Kenny groaned and set his teeth.

"I think," said Hughie, "he wants to apologize. He wrote you a note this morning and tore it up. And when I put his brandy bottle on his chair to-night he flung it at my head."

"I'll go this once," said Kenny. "But, so help me Heaven, I'll never go again!"

He went dully up the stair, cursing the blossom storm. Its monotonous patter on the roof had inspired Adam Craig to his first plea of loneliness; it had left Kenny himself with a haunting memory of drab solitude, pain and melancholy that seeped with a dripping sound into his very marrow; and it had begun for him the singular thraldom, inspired by pity, that he could not bring himself to understand.

Hughie had left the door of Adam's room ajar. The invalid sat by the table in his wheelchair, a book upon his knees, likely one of the pirate tales in which he reveled. His face was drawn and haggard, his eyes closed. With the wine of his excitement gone, he seemed but a huddled heap of skin and bone. A death's-head! Kenny shuddered. Unspeakable pity made him kind. The old man yonder was off his guard; he had pride and spirit that compelled respect.

Kenny softly closed the door and rapped.

"Come in!" said Adam Craig. Almost Kenny could see him chirking up into insolence and the pertness of a bird. It was precisely as he had expected. When the door swung back, Adam was erect in his wheel-chair, electric with challenge. His eyes were once more bright and sharp.

"Kenny," he demanded with asperity, "where have you been?"

Kenny glanced at the faded books stacked upon the bookshelves; and with the cabin uppermost in his mind he swung back dangerously to the hostile mood of the night before. Adam Craig was a miser, cruel and selfish. He had driven Joan and Donald to a refuge in the pines.

"I said," repeated Adam in a louder voice, "where have you been?"

"Picking wild flowers," said Kenny.

"You lie!" said Adam. "It's your way of telling me to mind my own business."

Kenny did not trouble to deny it.

"You've been sulking."

"Very well, then," said Kenny evenly, making use of his one weapon of composure, "let's concede that I've been sulking."

He was sorry instantly.

Infuriated, Adam brought his fist down upon the arm of his wheel-chair and, coughing, propelled himself up and down the room.

Kenny walked away to the window, sick with remorse. For the old man had coughed himself into gasping quiet. What could he do?

A wayward Irish tune, ludicrously fitting, danced into his head and made him smile.

"What shall I do with this silly old man?" whistled Kenny softly at the window.

"What's that?" demanded Adam suspiciously.

The insolence in his voice struck fire again. Kenny remembered his notebook and the hour of accounting. Never again would the forces Adam had revived sink into the quietude of his first days here at the farm.

"What's what?" he asked perversely.

"That asinine tune you're whistling?"

"It's a song," said Kenny innocently, "about a wild flower. And it was very wild. It had thorns."

"I think you lie," said Adam, glaring. "But as I have no womanish repertoire of songs to prove it, you can whistle it all you want and be damned to you."

Kenny at the window availed himself of the privilege.

"What's the name of it?" snapped Adam after a while, ruffled by his guest's persistence.

"'What shall I do with this silly old man?'" explained Kenny with a grin.

"You impudent liar!" cried the old man in a high, angry voice. "Do you ever tell the truth?"

"Almost never," said Kenny. "Do you?" And he went on with his whistling.

Adam ignored his impudence.

"Well, then," he said, "it's time you began. You're young enough, God knows. But it's not a youth of years. It's a superficial youth of spirit. And you're old enough to tell the truth."

"How shall I learn?"

"Practice!"

Kenny wheeled. Adam's careless dart had struck deep and sharp and it rankled.

"Very well, Adam," he said, "I'll practice on you."

Truth! Truth! he reflected passionately at the window. Was the world mad about it? And what was the matter with himself? Why did the romantic freaks of his fancy always fill him now with vague worry?

"What," gasped Adam, staring, "did you say?"

"I said," flung out Kenny, "that I'd practice telling the truth and I'd practice on you. And by Heaven I will!"

He wiped his forehead with a shaky hand. The room was warm, the lamp flickering hotly in the summer breeze. He thought of Joan and the ferry. Did she scull the old, flat-bottomed punt back and forth, back and forth, when the winter wind was howling up the river? What did she wear when winter settled, sharp and bleak, upon the ridge? Kenny shivered. He pictured her vividly in furs, warm and rosy, and hated the lynx-like eyes of the miser in the wheel-chair who doled out grudging pennies for nothing but his brandy. There was much that he could say if he told the truth; much the old man must be told if later Joan with her secret tears was to be saved the brunt of his hellish torment. He would force Adam Craig to stop the ferry. He would force him to buy furs. He would force him to endorse Mr. Abbott and his kindness, force him to grant Joan her books and the right to study, if she chose. Why in Heaven's name should she creep through rain and snow and shadows to the refuge in the pines?

He was dangerously excited with the fever of the old crusader in his veins. And then he thought of the trust in Joan's eyes when his tongue rambled, and went cold with shame. He must learn to tell the truth. He would practice for his own sake—and for the sake of Joan.

With a sense of shock he realized that he had been very far away. Adam was choking and wheezing and gasping himself into weakness.

"For God's sake," exclaimed Kenny with a feeling of guilt, "what's the matter? Are you laughing or choking?"

"I'm laughing," said Adam, shaking with mirth. "Kenny, I'm just laughing."

"Well," said Kenny huffily, "laugh your head off if you want to. I mean what I say."

The old man chuckled.

"I'd be disappointed," he said, "if you didn't."

Kenny stared at him in intense disgust. A perverse old lunatic! He would like his new diversion less perhaps as time went on.

"I want you to forget," Adam said abruptly, "about last night. I was—jealous. I hate your health. I—hate your straight legs—Oh, My God!" he whispered, shuddering, and closed his eyes. When he opened them his smile was ghastly.

"Kenny," he said with a pitiful air of bravado, "do you know a tune, an Irish tune called 'Eileen Aroon'?"

"Yes," said Kenny, clearing his throat. "Yes."

"Whistle it."

Kenny obeyed. His eyes were sympathetic,

"Well," said Adam in muffled tones, "it isn't Irish. It's Robin Adair and it came from Scotland."

But his voice was tired.

Kenny rummaged in the closet for his brandy.

"There are times," said Adam queerly, "when you've an open-hearted, understanding way about you. I believe you even know why I get drunk."

"Yes," said Kenny, "I think I do."

Adam dropped hack limply in his chair.

"It's because," he whispered, "I've—got—to—sleep!"

Startled at his manner, Kenny remembered the fairy mill and wondered.



CHAPTER XIII

KENNY'S TRUTH CRUSADE

Kenny began his truth crusade the next night.

"Adam," he said, halting on the threshold of the old man's sitting room with one hand carelessly behind him and his attitude expectant and determined, "I've often wondered why every book in the farmhouse is up here on your shelves."

Adam cupped his ear with his hand.

"Wh-a-a-a-t?" he asked blankly.

Kenny brought the hand behind his back forward. It held a megaphone.

"I said," he bellowed through it, "that I've often wondered why all the books in the farmhouse are here upon your shelves."

Adam sat up.

"For God's sake, Kenny," he said. "Close the door. Where did you get that thing?" he demanded with a scowl.

"It's Hughie's and the very sight of it was an inspiration."

"Give it to me!"

"On the contrary I intend to cure your deafness."

Adam stared.

"I mean just this: You can hear as well as I can. You pretend to be deaf when you don't want to hear."

"What?" snapped the old man with a glance like lightning.

"You told me to practice the truth," reminded Kenny, dropping into a chair. "I'm merely beginning. I've a lot to say. And the health of your hearing, Adam, is an indispensable adjunct to my practice hour and my peace of mind. I'm merely insuring myself against your refusing with a feint of deafness to hear what I have to say."

"For once," said Adam insolently, "you've scored. But if ever I get my hands on that damned megaphone, I'll burn it."

"You won't get your hands on it," retorted Kenny. "And if you do I'll buy a bigger one."

It was hard to begin but Kenny with his mouth set thought of Joan. He told Adam Craig he was a miser.

In the dreadful silence the tick of the old clock on the mantel seemed to Kenny's distracted ears a perpetuity of measured taps upon a death-drum. He thought of Poe and the pit and the pendulum. He thought of Joan and told himself fiercely that he did it all for her; for her he was winding around himself a chain foredoomed to clank. And he wondered why on earth the old man did not speak.

The suspense became intolerable. Intensely excited, Kenny swung to his feet.

"Well?" he said.

"Well!" said Adam and smiled a curious, inscrutable, twisted sort of smile. He had never looked so evil-eyed and subtle. "One of your greatest drawbacks, Kenny, is an Irish temper and a habit of excitement."

"A miser!" repeated Kenny with defiance. He must keep his feet upon the path. It was the prelude to all that he must say for Joan's emancipation.

"A miser!" said Adam, nodding. "Well, what of it?"

Kenny struck himself fiercely on the forehead, wondering if the word had pleased and not provoked him. The possibility shocked him into fresh courage. He said everything that was on his mind with deadly quietness and an air of fixed purpose. Then he picked up his megaphone and started for the door.

"Adam," he said, "I've told you the truth, so help me God, in an hour of practice. Now, you can practice facing facts."

And he was gone.

He was courageous and persistent, with the thought of Joan always spurring him to further effort. Night after night he played his game of truth and fought with desperation for the happiness of the girl whose eyes had committed him irrevocably to a vow of honesty and fact.

He could not see that he was making any headway.

Adam listened with baffling intentness while his strange guest practiced strangely the telling of truth. He refuted nothing. He accepted everything that Kenny said with a corroborative, birdlike nod of politeness. With the megaphone upon the floor by Kenny's chair, he made no further pretense of deafness. He said nothing at all and Kenny found his new inscrutable trick of silence unendurable. One singular fact loomed out above all others. Adam shamelessly accepted the word miser with a gloating chuckle. He seemed to like it. For Kenny, generous to a fault and prodigal with money, the word embodied all things hideous.

There were times when Kenny abandoned the hopeless battle and came at Adam's plea, reserved and sullen. Then with a solicitous air of virtue the old man urged him to renew it.

"Kenny," he demanded more than once, "have you got your practicing done? You lack application. If you're ever to learn truth at your stage of ignorance you'll have to have it."

The goad went home. He did lack application. And Joan must not suffer from that lack.

But in the end the old man tired him out; and the practice of truth became a boomerang.

Adam Craig smoothly demanded reciprocal privileges. Once more he told Kenny the truth about himself and drove the tormented Irishman again and again to his notebook. It had for him a morbid fascination. No matter how resolute the disdain with which he began to read it, he finished with his color high and his eyes incredulous and indignant. The barbs failed to lose their sting. They sank deeper and deeper. In a terror of defense Kenny returned to the fray with added vim. But Adam had a deftness with his barbs that his opponent lacked. Compassion drove the younger man to restraint. And Adam did not scruple to hide behind the bulwark of his own debility.

Night after night, mutinous at the glaring fact that in this singular battle of truth, Adam Craig was winning, Kenny rushed out into the peace and darkness of the night to seek Joan. It was inevitable that he should see in the wistaria ladder the means to starlit hours of delight. It was inevitable that Joan, to whom the vine was no more than an old, familiar stairway, would climb down to him with that shy oblivion of convention that was as much a part of her as her will-of-the-wisp charm.

They roamed in the dark silver of the star-light to the cabin in the pines and the hours that Joan had spent with Mr. Abbott or the books she loved, fell tinkling now with new melody into the lap of time. In the rude room, bright with lamplight and the trophies of childhood, the girl listened tirelessly to a musical Irish voice that read to her with brogue and tenderness enough to insure her interest in the reader no less than in his task. Kenny blessed the village congregation that had sent Mr. Abbott forth upon his needed month of recreation.

When the nights were cool enough, they built a fire of pine cones in the cabin stove and made tea and Kenny talked of Brian to ease his troubled heart. Joan listened wide-eyed to tales of the son Kenny said was all things in one.

"And you quarreled!" said Joan.

"Yes," said Kenny.

"So did Donald and I. How queer that is! Was it your fault, Kenny? Or was it Brian's?"

"It was my fault," said Kenny and lost his color. "But I know now that it wasn't the quarrel then that counted. It was the things that had gone before."

"How much you love him!" said Joan gently.

"Yes," said Kenny. "In this world of hideous complexities and uncertainty and—chains—of that at least I am sure."

"That," said Joan, "I like."

Mingled inextricably with this new fervor in his soul for truth, was the memory of the inspirational stage mother. The idle claim bothered him more and more. But there he was never brave enough to tell the truth.

Well, it was a queer world and he—Kennicott O'Neill—was thrall to a pitiful old fiend with the soul of a Caliban. He was unspeakably grateful for the relief of the hours when, with his conscience up in arms, he could talk to Joan of Brian and ease his misdeeds of the past by praise and appreciation.

A jewel of a lad! Everybody loved his humor, his compassion and his common sense.



CHAPTER XIV

IN SOMEBODY'S BOAT

The moon came silver in the valley and mingled with shadow among the trees. Owl's-light was nowhere, Kenny said, and the pines stood like shaggy druids in the silver dusk. The twilight of the moon he called it. Restless and poetic he begged Joan to help him find the lake down yonder in the valley. It was gleaming, to his fancy, with fairies' fire.