They found the lake and somebody's boat. Both were in a lonely glen. Kenny unwillingly conceded the existence of somebody with a claim upon the boat stronger than his own.

"But," he went on with an air of inspiration, "somebody is in the world or he wouldn't be somebody; and the world's my friend. Therefore by moon-mad deduction somebody's my friend and I may take his boat."

He released the painter, smiling up into Joan's face.

"Beside," he added, "he's either a young dub who doesn't know the moon is shining or an old cynic who doesn't care."

"Kenny!" said Joan, somewhat shocked by his inconsequent habits of acquirement. "I'm quite sure we shouldn't."

"Everything in the world you want to do," reminded Kenny, "you shouldn't. And everything in the world you shouldn't, you want to do!"

He flung his cigarette at a frog.

"The only thing to smoke on such a lake," he said, "is a fairy's pipe. Come, jewel machree, happiness is the aim of life. And my happiness for the moment, is to glide forth upon the bosom of that lake with you. Look, you can even see the gleam of silver shoes where the fairies dance upon the ripples."

He was indeed moon-mad in mood and irresistible. Joan smiled compassionately at the pleading of his eyes.

"But, Kenny," she said, holding back, "the aim of life isn't just happiness. That might be very dreadful. It's just happiness with the least unhappiness to others."

He stared at her a little startled. It was the sort of thing, he felt rebelliously, that he should write down in his notebook. Well, it was no night for notebooks. It was a night, a lake, a boat for lovers.

"Even granting that, girleen," he said, "it's not going to make somebody unhappy if we take his boat. For he won't know it. And therefore it will make us happy with the least possible unhappiness to anybody else. And, after all, it's more likely to be a fairy's boat, for it's made of quicksilver. Come, mavourneen, come!"

She climbed in unconvinced.

"Lordy! Lordy!" breathed Kenny in delight. "The lake is thatched with moonbeams!" And he thought of course of the legend of Killarney. "'Twas a valley like this, Joan," he said, "all rich with fields and pastures of green and there in the heart of it always was the fairy fountain covered with a stone to keep the water from rushin' out. And then came the knight."

His eyes pleaded. He was staging his legend and begging her to act.

"And then," said Joan smiling, "came the knight. I think his eyes were Irish."

"He saw a maid at the fountain," said Kenny, his eyes tender, "a maid with a pitcher and her skin was cream and her cheeks were rose and there were shadows of gold in her bronzy, nut-brown hair. I'm sure she wore a quaint old gown of blue and silver."

"Kenny!"

"And he liked her," said Kenny stubbornly. "You can't deny him that."

"No," said Joan gently. "And why should I deny it? For the blue and silver maid liked the knight."

Kenny's heart leaped to his eyes.

"They wandered on the hills and they wandered in the valley. And then the maid in blue and silver, who was all rose petals and sun shadows and the glory of autumn, ran back to the fountain. She had forgotten to cover it with the stone and the valley was flooded. There beautiful and calm stretched the lake of Killarney and I hope it was moonlight."

"And the knight and the maid?" Joan had forgotten their game of pretense. She was eager for the end of the story.

Kenny feathered his oars in silver spray and wondered impatiently why all love stories ended in an anticlimax. He had finished the story artistically and well. Luckily Joan had forgotten the stage and the actors.

"I suppose," he said gloomily, "that the knight married the maid and took her to dwell in a castle she must have hated. And they lived unhappily ever after."

Joan laughed. She saw in his words merely a perverse dislike for familiar endings and forgot it at once. The moonlit lake had aroused in her a yearning tenderness for the brother off somewhere in what, Kenny said, Brian called his Tavern of Stars.

"Oh, Kenny," she sighed, "I wish Donald would write!"

The wish jarred. Kenny frowned. How could he wish it too! And yet, not wishing was disloyal, disloyal to Brian. Upset, he turned, hurt and sulky. And presently as Joan, busy with thoughts of the truant brother, continued unaware of the melancholy in his mood that never failed to make its appeal to her tenderness, he began to hum.

Joan looked up.

"What a queer, wild tune!" she exclaimed. "What is it, Kenny? I've never heard you sing it before."

"I never felt the need," said Kenny. "It's called the 'Twisting of the Rope.' Long, long ago, girleen, a harper's gallantry to a pretty maid angered her mother and she asked him to help her twist a straw rope. And he did. And twisting he had to back away and over the threshold and the mother slammed the door in his face. Faith, 'twas all to get rid of him!"

It was impossible to miss the point. Joan's face went scarlet.

"Oh, Kenny!" she said. "You knew—surely you knew I couldn't mean that."

It was a new delight to hear her say it.

"When Donald writes," reminded Kenny, "then I must go." And watching the girl's troubled face, he wondered with a thrill of triumph if at last the madness of the summer was upon her. Well, thank Heaven, he was honest and honorable. He would stay until the madness waned. Always he was fated to climb down out of the clouds first.

Ah! But what if Joan slipped back into sense and sanity first? The possibility filled him with panic. What on earth would he do?



CHAPTER XV

IN WHICH CALIBAN SCORES

It was a prospect doomed to haunt him more and more as the summer which had bade fail to be so full of peace, took on an indescribable atmosphere of complication. Where could he go, he wondered despairingly, that life would not instantly pour around him a distracting whirlpool of commotion? Was he fated to rush through life with his fingers clenched in his hair and his teeth set? Was he doomed, as Garry had once said, to run forever in circles of excitement?

Stumbling and tired, Kenny tried to keep his feet unswervingly in the path of truth, colorless and uninviting as it seemed; but the strategy of his practice hour in Adam's room he was forced to abandon, heartsick for Joan and the future. His battle for her he knew had been in vain. Useless further to bombard with truth that silent, inscrutable Caliban upstairs, whose fiendish power to drive him to his notebook when he chose in turn to tell the truth, seemed uncanny. And it was practice enough to tell the truth to Joan! God grant, in all sincerity, that he might come to justify the faith in the dear eyes of her.

He made one last heroic effort to break his chain of thraldom. After an interval of bitter insubordination which ended each night in surrender, he set his teeth and vowed by every sacred thing he knew that to-morrow night, summons or no summons, he would not go to the sitting room of Adam Craig. He would secretly leave the farmhouse at dusk with Joan and when Hughie knocked on his bedroom door, ready to say that the old man was lonely and in pain, he would be safe and serene in the cabin in the pines. Was it fated to be his refuge too?

Torrential rain woke him in the morning. Kenny stared out at the wet valley in tragic unbelief. It simply could not be; for he wanted a dusk flecked with stars. But the rain gave no promise of abating and late that afternoon he altered the detail of his rebellion. Fortunately there were other ways. When the dusk closed in and the old man watched the clock and waited, he would go boldly downstairs to the old piano and register his rebellion in music that Adam Craig could hear. He would spend his evening openly with Joan; he would go through fire and water; he would ride the whirlwind and direct the storm but what this time he would assure his emancipation.

Instinct had warned him to abandon, in his hours with Adam Craig, certain picturesque forms of attire in which he delighted. To-night, whistling with a feeling of gayety and unrestraint, he rummaged his trunks, selecting his clothing with fastidious attention to minor detail and held the lamp high at the end to afford a better glimpse of the handsome Irishman smiling back at him from the mirror in the bureau. No doubt of it, give a fashionable tailor disposed to be experimental, his head and enough money on account and he could create a dash and piquancy worth while. Always remembering that such a creative artisan was fortunate to find a suitable contrast of shoulder and hip to wear his inspiration.

Kenny in the best of spirits went downstairs. The lamp in the parlor was already lighted; soft yellow shadows lay upon the faded walls; dust and cobwebs had long ago surrendered to the siege of Hannah's broom. Kenny drew the curtains to close out the splash of rain upon the window panes and went to the piano. Even the noise of wind and rain left him calm and cold and invincible. He played brilliantly snatches of everything he knew. When Joan came and curled up in a chair beside him with her chin upon her hand, he forgot Adam Craig entirely and went on playing. Not the music of rebellion; it was more the music of dreams, dusk-moths of melody that flitted through his memory, curiously iridescent.

He drifted dangerously after a while into the tenderness and passion of the Liebestraume, the one thing perhaps that, loving, he knew to the end; swept through the downward cadenza with exquisite accuracy and feeling, and forgot the rest. With the girl's soft pensive eyes upon him he could have forgotten anything; he even forgot that love is transient.

"Joan!" he gasped.

A loud voice rasped through the silence.

"Kenny!"

Joan shivered. Kenny stared at her in terror. It was the voice of Adam Craig.

"Kenny!" The voice, sharp with indignation, brought them both to their feet.

"Yes?" stammered Kenny, his face scarlet.

"Do you know all of anything?"

Lamp in hand Kenny went to the foot of the stairway.

"Adam," he demanded, staring up aghast at the wheel-chair and the wrinkled, saturnine face bending over the railing with a leer of triumph, "how in God's name did you get there?"

"Wheeled myself, you Irish fool!" snapped Adam.

Kenny went wearily up the stairway and set the lamp in a corner of the hallway.

"Well," bristled the old man. "Why don't you say something? What are you going to do about it?"

"It's the kind of night," said Kenny, "that you always have a fire. I'm going to wheel you back where it's safe and warm."

Adam chuckled.

"That's what I thought you'd do," he jeered.

"And then?"

"Then," thundered Kenny in a blaze of temper, "I'm going back!"

As usual his show of temper filled the invalid with delight.

"Humph!" said he. "So am I."

Kenny stopped the chair with a jerk.

"What do you mean by that?" he demanded.

"I mean," said Adam Craig, "that I'll wheel my chair back where I can listen to music instead of rain. And if you wheel me back I'll do it again. The hallway's dark and it's full of turns but I'll manage somehow, if I break my neck."

There was danger at every turn. A cold sweat came out on Kenny's forehead.

"Adam," he said quietly, "how did you manage to get there in the first place? How did you open the door of your room?"

"Wheeled myself close to the knob and unlatched it—"

"Yes?"

"Then I wheeled myself out of the way and poked at the door with a stick."

"Stick! What stick?"

"A stick out of a shade. Do you think I'm a fool?"

Kenny groaned.

"After that," purred the old man with a hint of pride, "until I got into the dark hallway and began to bump, it was easy."

The sitting room door was still open. Kenny wheeled his exasperating old man of the sea over the sill in a terror of foreboding.

Adam stared at him.

"Where in the name of Heaven," he said, "did you get that rig? You look like an actor."

Kenny turned a dark red and ignored the question.

"Don't like it!" jeered the old man.

"There's a Shakespeare quotation," reminded Kenny dangerously, "that begins—Hum! how does it begin? Yes. 'There was no thought of pleasing you' and so on. That's it."

"You impudent devil! Close the door."

"I'll close it when I go out. And I'll lock it."

They faced each other in a silence perilously akin to hate.

"Are you a Christian?" hissed Adam Craig between his teeth. "Or are you a heartless pagan?"

"I'm a pagan," said Kenny. "Orthodoxy, Adam," he added bitterly with thoughts of Joan, "I leave for such compassionate hearts as yours."

"I don't want it!" said Adam instantly. "It's churchiology, not Christianity. They are as different, thank God, as you and I."

A gust of wind and rain tore at the windows. The old man fixed his piercing eyes on Kenny's face. Kenny shuddered and looked away.

"Hear the rain!" said Adam.

"I hear it," said Kenny hopelessly.

"And you'll lock me in!"

"Yes!"

"I'll ring for Hughie and tell him to batter the door down. I would rather bump myself into eternity down that hallway," flung out Adam Craig passionately, banging his fist upon the arm of the wheel-chair, "than sit here, alone, to-night."

With his hands clenched Kenny choked back his anger and faced his fate. He could not lock the door. Either he must stay or go back with the haunting conviction that this hungry-eyed old fiend who could strum with diabolic skill upon the sensitive strings of his very soul, would propel himself in his wheel-chair to the stairway, there to sit like a ghoul at the top. Rain beat in Kenny's ears like a trumpet of doom. He felt sick and dizzy. No! with the memory of that last wonderful moment when the music had blended into the fire of his tenderness, he could not go back. Invisible, Adam Craig would still be pervasive. He would jar the idyl into a mockery, the indefinable malignity of him, alert and silent up there at the head of the stairs, floating down like an evil wind to mingle with the reminiscent sound of rain.

"Well?" said the old man softly.

"Oh, my God!" said Kenny, wiping his forehead. "I'll stay!"

"Good!" said Adam, moistening his lips. "Good! You know, Kenny," he whispered, shivering, "I—I hate the rain."

"Yes," said Kenny wretchedly, "so do I."

"Kenny," said the old man later when Kenny had carried the lamp back and made sure that Joan had gone to her room, "don't sulk. You're old enough to know better."

"I'm not sulking."

"You are."

"Very well, then, I am."

"You've had enough music for one night."

Kenny did not trouble to reply. Whatever he said would be combated.

"Music," insisted Adam, "makes you as noisy as a magpie. If you're not whistling, you're singing some damned rake of an Irish song and if you're not singing, you're at the piano battering out a scrap-heap of tunes."

"From the first day until the last when he goes to sleep with a daisy quilt over him," said Kenny stiffly, "an Irishman lives his life to music."

"Humph!" said the old man, ready for battle, "the music of his own voice, telling lies."

Reckless, Kenny used his one weapon of composure. It made the old man cough with fury and propel himself up and down the room in his wheel-chair until, with a feeling of whirling fire in his brain, Kenny wondered if a man could lose his sanity by watching an infuriated lunatic in a wheel-chair narrowly miss everything in his way.

But he made no further effort at rebellion. Instead he went each night, invincible in his determination not to be outdone. When by playing on his pity Adam trapped him he smiled and shrugged. When the old man assailed him with shafts of truth, no matter what the aftermath of communion with himself and his notebook, he accepted it with composure and an air of interest. When in a fury, Adam reviled him for his phlegm, he laughed and was cursed for his pains.

"You told me, Adam," he said, "that my greatest drawback is a habit of excitement and temper. Excitable I shall probably be all my life. It's temperamental. But I'm learning to control my temper."

In a week his coolness and composure were bearing horrible fruit.

Exhausted by blind fits of rage, racking spells of coughing and more brandy than usual, the invalid's weakness became pitifully apparent. He seemed now but a shaking shadow, gray and gaunt. Even the doctor, who accepted him with fatalistic calm, confessed alarm. And Kenny, with his teeth set and his fingers clenched in his hair, faced another problem. He was to blame and he alone! What in the literal name of mercy was he to do?

There was one alternative left and one only. Either he must meet the old man's hunger for battle with a show of temper, the blacker the better, or leave the farm for good. But even with his thraldom heavy on his soul the prospect of leaving Joan filled him with pain and panic. There remained then but the show of temper in which Adam would be sure to thrive.

So Kenny set himself to his freak of mercy. Thereafter, when the need arose, he walked the floor under the piercing battery of Adam's eyes, blazing forth a fury that, in the circumstances, with his sense of the ridiculous upper-most, could not be real. He raved and swore when he wanted to collapse in a chair and rock with nervous laughter.

Keen, alert, intensely delighted, Adam began to thrive. Chuckling he slipped back to his normal state of debility. Finding in the stress of his victim's tempestuous surrender that he forgot the megaphone, he perversely began again to have trouble with his ears.

Kenny and his megaphone returned to the fray.

Thus September came, warm and golden. Haze, soft and indistinct lay in the valley and on the hills. Summer lingered in the garden but on the ridge the nights were cool and in the swamplands, Hughie said, already the maples were coloring with a hint of colder weather. Here and there on birch and poplar fluttered a yellowing leaf.

And Donald had not written.

Kenny, as the days slipped by, faced a new and tragic problem. October was at hand. Work beckoned with urgent hand. If he did not go soon somebody would have to balance up his check book for him and tell him how long he could live without working. Brian, dear lad, had been a jewel at figures.

But how could he work with the thought of the winter wind and Joan tormenting him? And the snow-bound cabin in the pines? And the ferry and the ladder of icy vine? And Adam Craig?

He could not, would not go! And where in the name of all lunatics was Brian? Life in the studio without him would be impossible. What did he intend to do? Could he, Kenny, settle down to work with the problem of his penitential quest for his son still unsettled?

And why in the name of the Sacred Question-mark, was his life a string of questions!

In the end he fled from Adam's tongue. So he told himself. In reality panic plunged him into action. His summer was ending. His madness was not. And for that alarming fact he blamed Brian.

"I was worried," he remembered irritably, "and just in the mood to make a colossal fool of myself. And I have!"

Otherwise this seizure must have run its course by now. It bothered him that he had pledged himself to linger at the farm until Joan was quite herself. Surely the gods of love and honor would understand that he had foreseen no such troublous dilemma as that which faced him now. He must take himself in hand. He must find an undisturbing level of common sense and keep his roving feet upon it. The need was drastic.

"I'll be back in a month," he told Joan, his lips white with compassion for himself and her, and stared moodily at the blaze of autumn on the hills, knowing he would not return. "Often I've longed for a winter of sketching in such a wild and lonely spot."

"And then," said Joan, "when Donald writes you must be here."

"I must be here," said Kenny.

That he felt was the kindest way. Surely, surely it was the kindest. It saved Joan the painful thought of permanent separation. In a month without him she would soon forget. A month, he knew of old, worked wonders. Absence, he had proved again and again, never made a heart grow fonder. Propinquity was at once a danger and a cure.

Joan waved him down the farm lane, her soft eyes wistful. An adorable will-of-the-wisp! Almost he could not bring himself to leave her. But for Hughie's eyes, he would have vaulted from the farm buggy, crying her name.

"The farm," she had said with frank tears in her eyes, "will be just like a grave without you."

Kenny knew it would.

The studio he found could match it.



CHAPTER XVI

TANTRUMS

Things went badly from the start. Whitaker for one thing claimed to have lost track of Brian and Kenny thought he lied. For another, he could not bring himself to work. A sense in the studio of a presence gone, he told Garry, haunted him, Brian's lazy authoritative guardianship and the comparative order to which he could reduce existence when he chose were indispensable to his daily comfort.

Ah! unbelievably care-free—those old devil-may-care days when Brian had been content to work and laugh and quarrel! Kenny, looking back with longing, likened his plight to that of Ossian returning after three hundred years of fairy bliss from the fabled delights of Tirnanoge. Touched earth he had, in spite of warning, and become on the minute a wrinkled, old, old man. So with Kenny. He had touched earth, he reflected tragically. Never again would his fairyland be quite the same. Man talked of his flaws. His fallibility they said was monumental. There was Adam who had morbidly incited him to a notebook, a damnable, pervasive notebook which he tried in vain to ignore. There was Whitaker, to whom, at a loose end, he wrote a great many letters of rebuke, some stately, some less so. There was Brian, whose absence had revolutionized his pleasant way of life; and Garry and Jan and Sid, who at any cost merely wanted him to work. Grievance enough for any man who resented the disturbance of unneeded change.

The truth of it was, he owned at times, he was homesick for Joan and fed his loneliness with letters he felt himself obliged to write. That was inevitable, for he had fled from an idyl and the memory of its charm must lessen slowly. Often with an eye upon the clock he found himself picturing the routine of the farm and longing for its freedom from the petty need of work.

He blew the horn beneath the willow and watched Joan cross the river in the punt. He climbed the garret stairway and helped her pick a gown. He watched the Gray Man steal along the ridge, lingering in boxwood paths and in the orchard. And then with night among the pines and the plaintive voice of autumn wind, Joan was climbing down the vine and hurrying through the wood to the cabin, and Adam with his eye upon the brandy was counting wearily when the clock struck. How the wind would rattle at his windows! How the log would flare! How Adam must be longing for excitement! And how glad he was that he himself had found a safe hiding place in a lonely tree-stump for the lantern Joan had reluctantly agreed to carry since the fall closed in.

Um . . . Joan would be building a fire in the cabin now and drawing the shades and Mr. Abbott would be picking his way through the pines with a book beneath his arm. Kenny glowered some at Mr. Abbott. An eye for nothing there but duty and even that he saw in a stark and unromantic way. And he lacked a sense of humor. He'd proved it in the river. Joan answered his letters with an adorable primness that filled him with delight. It reflected Mr. Abbott. But her letters ended always with the naivete of a child. They all missed him.

It was pleasant to be missed.

The pleasure was curiously reactive. Kenny's irritability grew too marked to be ignored. Jan and Sid and Garry met and talked him over.

"What's wrong with him?" demanded Sid, amazed. "Garry, what is it? He's as quarrelsome as a magpie and nothing suits him. He barks at the club-boys and if you drift into the studio you're about as welcome as the measles."

"It's not because he's busy," said Garry grimly. "Nothing I've found is further from his mind than the thought of work."

"And it's plain Brian isn't coming back," put in Jan. "He might as well face that fact and have done with it. Personally I've lost patience with him. He acts like a sulky kid."

Later Jan improvised a "scarlet fever" placard which Kenny in the course of time found nailed upon his door. He read with amazed and offended eyes that he was temporarily in temper quarantine.

It soon became apparent that life without Brian was maintaining even more than its usual average of petty complication. The problem of small change Kenny found a torment. There Brian had been a jewel. It simply narrowed down to this, he told Garry: No matter how he started, he never had any. Even a bag of change he had procured from the bank in a moment of desperation was never to be found. It got under things. His eventual solution of the difficulty plunged the club into scandal and uproar. He found the bag of change and sprinkled coins into everything in the studio that would hold them.

"Now," he informed Garry with moody satisfaction, "I'll always be able to put my hand on some when I want it. I wonder I didn't think of it before. I'm better with big sums. Dimes and nickels and even quarters make me nervous. You know how it is, Garry. I always have to come in to you or do one of a number of desperate things. And then if I can't find a small coin and tip with a big one, Jan gets wind of it somehow and talks by the hour about demoralizing the club-boys. He's a pest."

The device at first bade fair to be successful. Later there was frenzied recourse to Garry to help him remember where on earth the dimes were likely to be. Later still the pages helped. The sequel came quickly. The studio attained suspicious popularity with one or two new untried boys who mined the studio in Kenny's absence and tipped themselves. Kenny, as scandalized as only Kenny could be, turned sleuth and reported the thing in wrath. Everybody missed something and the club buzzed with scandal until the boys departed, likely, Kenny thought bitterly, to retire for life on the dimes and nickels they had dug out of his studio.

Why must he always be the central pivot of a whirlpool of excitement? God knows he loved peace even if Fate never permitted him to sample it. He laid the whole thing unconditionally at Brian's door. Let Brian, instead of shirking his usual numismatic responsibilities in some indefinite green world of peace and calm, come home as he should.

As for work, Kenny loved work, Brian and Garry to the contrary. If in Brian's absence everything conspired against his passionate love of industry, it was no fault of his. Along with the torment of doubts that assailed him, thanks to that infernal notebook, the studio kept catapulting itself into a jungle of nerve-racking disorder in which it was impossible to work. And when Mrs. Haggerty fell upon it with the horrible energy of the Philistine and found places for everything, the studio became a place in which no self-respecting painter could be expected to keep his inspiration or his temper. Here again, Kenny felt aggrievedly, was a condition which Brian's presence could have altered. The lad had a way of mitigating order and disorder with a curious result of comfort.

Garry lost his patience.

"You remind me," he said, "of the English squire who only drank ale on two occasions; when he had goose for dinner and when he didn't."

Kenny remarked that the squire by reason of his nativity was a fool. And the thing couldn't be helped. The studio in order was impossible. He added with an air of inspiration that it made him think of mathematics. Mathematics he considered a final argument against anything. Besides, he was unusually fallible. Garry must always keep that in mind. Let the infallibles work. If there was only something he liked well enough, he'd drink himself to death.

"I suppose you are aware," thundered Garry, thoroughly exasperated, "that even a painter must work to live? The whole club's buzzing over your tantrums. There's been some talk of chaining you to an easel with a brush in your hand for your own good."

Kenny as usual consigned the club to Gehenna. Nevertheless, as Garry saw, he winced. Very well, he would work, furiously, as only he knew how to work and when he had scored another brilliant success—

Fate intervened. To his intense excitement Kenny was summoned for jury duty. He managed after much difficulty to place the blame of this too at Brian's door. Brian, he remembered, had flirted with the daughter of an uptown judge. Likely he had boasted about his father's versatility.

Inevitably on the morning there was civic need of him at court, Kenny awoke with a fever for work, shocked at his record of indolence. Garry found him in a painter's smock, conspicuously busy with a yard-stick and crayon. Everything in the studio on rollers had been rearranged. A chafing dish of coffee, sufficient to stimulate him through a day of fearful labor, stood upon a table beside a supply of cigarettes.

"Now, Kenny," said Garry, who was finding his responsibilities in Brian's absence more or less complex, "you know hanged well you have that jury thing on this morning. I'm going with you."

Kenny filled a battered tin-cup with something he had to sniff for purposes of identity, unearthed a number of brushes and defiantly polished a palette with a wad of cheesecloth.

"I'll be damned if I go!" he bristled. "I'm too busy."

Garry looked directly at him and compelled a slight faltering of his gaze.

"It's the one day I've felt like work," blustered Kenny, squaring off his canvas. "You spoke of work, didn't you? And a fool of an English squire who ate goose? Let the idle rich sit around in squads and swear they don't read the newspapers. I do. Me on a jury! My dear Garry! I can't even sit still in my own studio. You know that yourself."

Nevertheless after a heated argument he went wearily with Garry in a taxi, particularly individualistic in his attire. And he told the judge in a richer brogue than usual that he was a painter subject to irresistible fits of dreaminess and must be excused. Garry, aghast, stared at the judge and the judge, with peculiar interest stared at the delinquent and excused him.

"Fortunately," Garry told him later, "your civic duties haven't spoiled your day."

Kenny merely glanced at him with a gentle air of patience. He would like to remind Garry that he had wanted to work and, thanks to Brian, the law had intervened. Now the coffee would be cold and he hated the sight of cold coffee. It depressed him.

Things thickened alarmingly. At three that afternoon, when he answered a violent thump upon the wall, Garry found the Louis XV table in a cloud of smoke; it was littered with vouchers and check books. Kenny, with his teeth set and one hand clenched in his hair, was figuring with the speed of an expert without, Garry felt sure, an expert's results. Brian, Kenny said aggrievedly, had always kept his check book straight.

"Look!" he flung out, indicating a problematical balance. "Look at that! And the fool says I'm overdrawn."

"What particular fool?"

"Some clod of a mathematician," explained Kenny with contempt, "whom the bank employs to insult its patrons. Look here, Garry! Look at that balance. Over a thousand dollars. Do you wonder I told him he had a sense of humor when he said I was overdrawn? The young popinjay! Arguing with me about my own balance!"

"How did it end?"

"I told him," said Kenny formally, "that the bank would most likely demand his resignation in a few days. And when he began to grow mathematical and persistent, I hung up."

Garry patiently sorted the vouchers and balanced the check book while Kenny in frenzied consideration of a new complication roved around the studio and smoked. He was a God-fearing Irishman. He wanted peace. But if ever a man's destiny knew unheard-of complication! Well, all of it could be traced to Brian's unscrupulous flight. He must come back. Kenny felt that his career was menaced. Life in the studio had become intolerable. He had been embroiled in two scandals, thanks to Brian's bouillon cups and Brian's unscrupulous shirking of numismatic responsibility. Everybody was talking about him; he had Garry's word for it. He couldn't work. When he could he was summoned for jury duty. His accounts, like the studio, were in a mess and he'd overdrawn. If something didn't happen soon—

"Shut up!" said Garry. "How on earth do you suppose that I can work with you talking all over the studio? Here are three pages of checks when you were evidently hitting the high spots, that you've failed to subtract. Three on a page. That makes your balance overdrawn."

Kenny struck an attitude of acute despair. "God of my fathers!" he groaned, changing color. "It can't be. Garry, it simply can not be!"

"It can and is," said Garry pushing away the book.

"Adams still owes me five thousand dollars for his wife's portrait," sputtered Kenny.

"And now he's out of town."

"What on earth did you do with Reynolds' last check? You had enough there to live a year."

Kenny looked dazed.

"I recognized the danger with Brian's commercial instinct gone," he stammered, "and—and conserved my funds."

"You must have. You bought a lot of clothes," reminded Garry. "And paid some bills."

"Some," admitted Kenny.

"Enough," commented Garry, "to establish, I suppose, one of your startling flurries of credit."

Kenny had meant to pay more. But the bank had put an end to that to-day by intruding into his private affairs. He'd even meant to redeem Brian's shotgun and anything else he'd pawned.

"Lucky for Brian," put in Garry, "that you've mesmerized Simon into holding things indefinitely even when you don't pay the interest. And of course you blew in a good part of the check on something foolish."

Kenny said with dignity that he'd bought a rug, nothing foolish. It hung over there. An exquisite thing, sensuous and soft! Color and form enough to drive a man mad with delight. He'd dreamt of the thing for days before he bought it. Indeed he'd meant not to buy it but something had snapped in his brain when he looked at it. Look at the design. Never once did it tire the eye, free-flowing and sure. Its intricate simplicity was amazing.

"And you paid a small fortune for it," said Garry. "Don't sputter. The voucher's here."

Kenny sulked. Finding that Garry still had a tendency to finger disconcerting checks and jot figures on a pad, he reached for his hat and went out.

"I'm going to do some illustrating for Graham," he telephoned a little later, "if I do it quick. I'm with him now. I presume it's etiquette to do something financial when you're overdrawn. Brian always watched the bank to see that they put nothing over on me."

He disappeared from human ken for several days. Garry, sniffing the odor of coffee and cigarettes in the corridor outside his door, pictured his horrible concentration.

"It's that hazy autumn sort of weather that gets me," he telephoned nervously one morning. "I don't want to work and I've got to finish this stuff for Graham to-day. He'll pay at once if I do. Garry, I'm going to lock the studio door and throw the key over the transom to you. Don't let me out, no matter what I say."

Obediently Garry at four ignored a violent thump upon the wall. Then the telephone rang and Kenny said with some annoyance that the work was done.

When on the following day he found that Mr. Adams had returned and wanted, purposefully perhaps, to come to tea, he lost his temper and began at once to hunt cups, demanding of Garry why on earth Fate hadn't smiled upon him before he wasted his vigor and inspiration in endless hours of torture, doing pot-boilers.

"If he's coming to tea with a red-blooded check like that," said Garry, "I'll lend you some decent cups. Those bouillon cups are the limit."

"Oh, hell!" said Kenny moodily. "I've talked with him. I've even answered his questions with politeness. A man who wants to know if you must have a north light to paint by will think it a rule of the guild to double-handle teacups."



CHAPTER XVII

KENNY DISAPPEARS

That night Whitaker brought him news of Brian. He was healthy and happy and wrote no word of coming in. There, Whitaker felt himself, Brian was over-reticent.

"And the postmark?" Kenny staring in disgust at a hole in his sock transferred his glance to Whitaker.

"That," said Whitaker, "I'm not at liberty to give. I've told you so before."

Kenny drew himself up to his full height.

"John—" he thundered.

The door opened and Mac Brett, the young sculptor on the floor above who harbored H. B., came in, somewhat mystified at the warmth of Whitaker's greeting.

"Come on down to the grill to dinner," he suggested. "Garry's down there and Jan. It's drizzling and a lot of men are staying in."

Kenny, moodily painting the skin beneath the hole in his sock black, flung down the brush and found his coat.

"Once," said Mac in a panic of laughter, "he painted hairs on the bald parts of Frieda Fuller's pony-skin coat. Thick, plutocraticky sort of hairs. I shan't forget 'em. And they melted and smudged her neck. Remember, Kenny? You ridged 'em beautifully—"

Kenny did not answer. He strode toward the door. Mac and Whitaker exchanged comprehending glances of dismay and followed him down to the grill.

It was a pleasant refuge from the autumn storm—that grill. The dark old wood framed light and color, sketches and a line of paintings. Mac's sculptured ragamuffin looked wistfully down from his niche near the open rafters upon a Round Table institutionally fraternal. He seemed always seeking warmth and food. Kenny's old peasant in wrinkled apple-faced cheer smiled broadly from the wall, listening to the click of billiard balls with his painted eyes upon the doorway.

The hum and clatter at the Round Table stopped as Kenny entered. It was followed by an immediate scraping of chairs, pushed back, and a hearty chorus of greeting but Kenny knew, intuitively, that the talk had been of him.

He ate but little and went back to the studio to play dummy bridge with Mac and Whitaker. A loud thump on the studio door and a Morse dot and dash announcement of identity on the bell just as he had pieced a pack of cards together, filled him with intense resentment.

"Max Kreiling!" he said with a sniff. And a little later: "Caesare!" He thought perhaps, feeling as he did in a mood for murder, he wouldn't let them in, abuse the door panel and the bell as they would. Whitaker did it for him.

"They'll come in and play music on my piano," he insisted sulkily, "and sing notes into my air and I repeat I'm in no mood for music."

But Kreiling, big, blond and Teutonic, was already striding in with Caesare at his heels. They filled the air with joyous greetings, thumped upon the intervening wall for Garry and unloaded their pockets and an institutional leather bag.

"Cheese," rumbled Kreiling, "jam, coffee and mince pies."

Caesare unsheathed his fiddle and played a preposterous rag-time interpretation of the Valkyrie's battle-cry. It evoked an instant response from the telephone.

"It's Mac," said Whitaker. "He says he'll be down in a jiffy and bring Jan with him."

"Tell him," grumbled Kenny, "to bring beer instead. No fault of mine, Max," he added, "if Jan comes down here and eats your cheese. He's a cheese lunatic. Blame Tony. He comes into my studio, does a Pied Piper stunt on his fiddle and the whole building appears."

To Whitaker's amusement nobody heeded Kenny's petulance. Caesare was already building a wood-fire in the fireplace, complaining of the chill. Max Kreiling was furiously hunting missing sheets from a ragged stack of music on the piano and grumbling in German about his host's habits. The fire flared. Caesare's dark face, always tense, relaxed into smiles. When Garry appeared the wood-fire was blazing and Caesare was plucking in nervous pizzicato at the strings of his fiddle. Later Mac arrived with beer, a loaf of rye bread and Jan, who gravitated at once by permanent instinct to the cheese.

Kenny morosely hunted cigarettes and reflected with raised eyebrows that the studio was never entirely his, not even when he wanted vehemently to quarrel with Whitaker. And last came Sidney Fahr, round and merry, who looked casually in, nibbled at a gumdrop and professed amazement to find so many there. Kenny unreasonably chose to take affront at his chronic amazement and withdrew to a corner in a state of gloom and disgust, whence Kreiling, sensitively alive to atmospheric dissonances, routed him forth with the heated accusation that he was not gemuetlich.

Whitaker looked on through a film of smoke. Ordinarily he knew it was the sort of evening that fired Kenny to his maddest mood of fun and sparkle. It was the romance of his Bohemia, the thing upon which he fed his sense of the picturesque, ignoring the lesser things that bothered Brian. Men loved him. In the glow of their camaraderie he was always at his best, excited, joyous, irresponsibly gay and hearty. But to-night the fun and sparkle passed him by. Garry was right. He was surely not himself. Could it be—just Brian?

"'Pagliacci!'" demanded someone.

Kreiling laughed indulgently and beckoned Jan to the piano. His big voice, powerful and tender, swept into the hush like a splendid bird.

Kenny snapped off the lights, plunged into tragic sadness by the passion of his voice. Somehow its poignant sweetness hurt. The droplight over the music and the flare of the fire leaped out of the darkness like medallions. Faintly from a corner came the whisper of Caesare's violin, offering obligato.

Then he closed his eyes to block but the sight of rain splashing on the window. Enchanted rain surely! For it transformed the single pane into many, like a checkerboard of glass, and through it he was staring queerly into the farm.

Kreiling mopped his forehead at the end and switched on the lights. The silence he understood and liked but his keen eyes lingered in surprise on Kenny's face. His color was gone, his eyes curiously tired and wistful.

"So!" said Kreiling gently and passed on to the cheese with deliberate tact, pushing Jan away. A minute later his hand came down with heartiness on Kenny's shoulder.

"Spitzbube!" he rumbled affectionately.

Kenny laughed but Whitaker saw that his cigarette was shaking.

"Music," he reflected, feeling sympathetic, "always makes him wild and sentimental. And Max sang like an archangel."

"Now, Kenny," commanded Kreiling, nibbling cheese and rye bread, "play."

Kenny sullenly obeyed. After the first effort, something rebellious touched his sullen mood to fire and he played fragments of the Second Rhapsodic with madness in his touch.

Sid, aware of it, stared in round-eyed apprehension at his back.

"He's just in the mood again for rocketing," he decided.

From then on Kenny's reckless gayety kept them in an uproar.

When someone clamored for a wood-fire tale he told them of Finn's love for Deirdre. But the discussion it provoked bored him and he dropped back, smoking, in his chair,

"There is love and love," said Max Kreiling, "and to be in love is torture and a thing of self, but when the big splendid tenderness comes after the storm of self and craving, the tenderness that knows more of giving than of demanding, it comes to stay. But it's not the love of barbarity like Finn's. It's an evolution."

"Ask Kenny," said Mac mischievously. "He's an expert."

"Love, my son," said Kenny wearily, "is poetic like summer lightning. It flashes, blinds in a glory of light—and then disappears—in time."

He tired early and sent them home. Whitaker longed to linger but the moody cordiality of Kenny's good night was only too significant. He departed with regret.

"Garry!" called Kenny at the door.

Garry turned back.

"I meant you to wait," said Kenny irritably, "but you got out before I could tell you." He closed the door. "Garry, what were the men in the grill saying to-night when I came in?"

Caught unawares Garry flushed and stammered.

"Why," he evaded uncomfortably, "it began about the peasant picture in the grillroom. Everybody likes it."

"And then?"

"We talked some of the last thing you did—the winter landscape of snow and pines."

Garry looked away.

"Out with it!" said Kenny suspiciously. "For God's sake grant me the privilege at least of lumping it all in one supreme period of upheaval. They didn't like the pine picture?"

"On the contrary," Garry hastened to assure him, "Hazleton said you are brilliantly skillful."

"Brilliantly skillful! But?" prompted Kenny and looked a question. "Brilliant skill," he added moodily, "doesn't always make a big painter."

"Hazleton said as much," admitted Garry.

"I suppose it's best to tell you, Kenny," he added honestly, hoping to spur the culprit on to more and better work. "It may help. They said downstairs that you interpret everything, even trees and snow, in terms of unreality. You over-idealize. I suppose it's your eternal need of illusion. We've spoken of that before."

"I'm not a photographer!" blazed Kenny. "Any camera will give you realistic detail. Artistic too. What else? Go on, Garry. I'm calloused to the hearing of anything. I merely thank God you've had no newspaper training."

"Most of the older painters," Garry said with reluctance, "seem to feel that—well, there's too colorful a dominance of self in your work. Your personality always overshadows. You've an extraordinary fluency with color, a deft assurance, a brilliancy that leaves one rather breathless and incredulous, but what you do is autocratically, unforgettably—almost unforgivably—you!"

"Art," explained Kenny loftily, "is reality plus personality. And personalities are variously vivid and anaemic. Unreal, over-idealized, too colorful a dominance of self and personality overshadows," he summarized after an interval of silence. "And in the face of that—success. I am successful?"

"Undeniably."

"Even Hazleton, with his sordid gangs of Eastsiders nudging each other on a dirty bench, can't deny it," bristled Kenny.

He had divided the honors of more than one exhibition with Hazleton and admired and resented him impartially.

"It has been said," said Garry, ruffled by his air of triumph, "that you paint down subtly to the popular fancy where you might paint up to your own ideals."

The barb went home. Kenny flushed.

"Your work," added Garry, "lacks the force and depth of sincerity. Even in Brian's dreadful East River sunset over there, there's a quality you lack, an eagerness for reality and truth and life as it is. Brian has painted poorly what he saw but he painted boats for ragged sailors. Real boats. You've painted brilliantly, in the pine picture for instance, what you wanted to see, a dark forest for mystic folk to dance in when the moonlight lies upon the snow."

"And what," inquired Kenny with a shade of sarcasm, "was the final verdict of the grill jury when all the evidence was in?"

"Remember old Dirk, Kenny? He said that the fullness of life came through—sacrifice. That all things, good and permanent and true, come only out of suffering; that men pay for their dreams with pain." He let the full import of that drive home. "The verdict was, that if you'd forget your public and look for truth, paint with restraint and less brilliant illusory abandon, you'd be a big painter."

"And that," said Kenny with icy politeness, "unalterably defines my status as a painter. In this club at least."

"You asked me—"

Kenny looked tired but he held out his hand. "Dear lad," he said, "'twas fine brave friendship to tell me—when I asked you."

Failure! He, Kennicott O'Neill who had been decorated by the French government! The men in the grill then talked openly of his flaws and the verdict, officious or otherwise, was failure. Flaws! He was not a big painter. He was merely a self-centered, impecunious, improvident Irishman, indifferently skillful, whose vanity and self-indulgence had driven his son off into a vague green world, God alone knew where. He was a big painter! Posterity would fling that back in the teeth of men!

"Kenny!"

It was Garry's voice.

"I'm going."

"Oh," said Kenny vaguely. "Yes, of course."

He was grateful when the door closed, though he stood for full a minute afterward tapping on the table with his fingers. Then indignantly he looked up the word failure in Brian's dictionary and underscored it heavily.

Ah! this world of his was amazingly awry and he himself was hurt and unhappy. After all, was there any romance, any camaraderie in the Bohemia he once had loved. By Heaven, no! One had but to stare at the studio with Brian's vision to see the thing aright. Disorder and carping tongues and loneliness! God help him, how he longed to escape somewhere, anywhere where there was peace—and faith and friendliness in human eyes.

Afterward, a painter on the floor below, swore that Kenny had tramped the floor all night and there had been occasional thuds. At daylight he had gone out hurriedly and banged the door.

Sid, entering the studio by the door Kenny had forgotten to lock, found abundant evidence of frenzied packing and carried the news to the grill.

"I knew it," he said. "I knew it last night. By the Lord Harry, it was in his eye. Where on earth d'you suppose he's gone?"

"God knows," said Garry and heartily wished he'd kept the grillroom verdict to himself.

At sunset Kenny blew the horn beneath the willow.

Twilight here among the vivid leaves was softly orange. Where was the invisible lamp, Kenny wondered with his blood singing, that filled the world with golden dusk? It lay reflected in the water and in the dim and yellowed forest paths behind him. And there behind the gables of the farm, an autumn sunset focussed its softness into a brilliant blaze of color.

Later when life was kind and peace was in his heart, Kenny was to paint that picture with exquisite truth and restraint and call it "Afterglow."

At the flutter of a cloak on the cliff-path he slipped behind the willow.

For an eternity it seemed he traced the forward sweep of the punt until it grated on the shore. And the surprise perversely came to him.

"Kenny!" called Joan.

There was mischief and laughter in her voice—and welcome. And Kenny, oblivious of the detail of his going, knew only that he stood beside her in the golden dusk and that her eyes were curiously like shining, leaf-brown stars.

"Ah!" he reproached, catching both her hands. "You are a witch. You're burning an invisible lamp of incense off somewhere in that yellow wood and out of it comes the twilight and the secrets of the world. How did you know?"

"The horn was so excited!"

"The horn!"

Joan nodded.

"I know them all," she said. "Mr. Abbott blows an apology for disturbing me. Mrs. Lawler is stout and when she's delivering butter and eggs, her wind doesn't last and she gets no further than a toot, and the blacksmith's wind is amazing—"

"Enough!" said Kenny sternly. "You've too much wisdom. But—"

"Of course," said Joan, "I didn't know you would ride to the village yonder but I thought you might. Uncle said you wouldn't come."

Kenny laughed. Joan never knew that he had not meant to come again.

He found home in the farm kitchen and joyously pumping homely hands, stepped at once on the tail of Hannah's cat. Toby, after a vocal minute of terror, fixed a hard eye upon his heel and withdrew at once to a sheltered spot behind the stove. He had learned before that Mr. O'Neill with his head in the clouds was frequently unaware of feet things.

Kenny went of his own accord to Adam's sitting room.

Almost he surprised a glint of welcome in the old man's piercing eye.

"Well, Adam," he said happily, "I'm back!"

"Humph!" said Adam ungraciously. "I knew you would be."

By the end of the week Kenny forgot that he had been away.



CHAPTER XVIII

BRIAN SOLVES A PROBLEM

To Brian had come a problem of his own. His vagabond days were nearly over. Now with the wind cool at twilight and the dawns sharp, the two wayfarers, lean and brown as gypsies, were tramping back over the trail of the summer, finding old fires and the delight of reminiscence.

"Don," said Brian one twilight as they swung along in the dust of a country road, "if I'm not mistaken back yonder is the field where you barked for a summer show. Man alive," he added with a laugh, "how you did bark! Now with a summerful of health in your system and your voice full of fresh air, I could understand it, but then! Honestly, old top, I didn't know it was in you!"

The boy looked up and laughed.

"It wasn't," he said with utter truth. "You told me I could do it and I—I just did."

"I knew you could do it!" said Brian with the vigor of confidence that had made the boy his slave. "Still, when you unleashed that first roar and the crowd began to collect, I confess I thought you'd busted something vital and were yelling for help."

Don glanced at this clothes. The summer show had freed him from the mended rags he hated. Shirt and trousers, hat and shoes were as near like Brian's as they could be. So was the coat upon his arm and the knapsack on his back.

"Whenever you tell me I can do a thing," he said, "and hang around to see me do it, I can always somehow seem to make myself do it. Look!" he broke off with a boyish grin, pointing at a farmhouse on a distant hill. "There's the farm where you threw the can of whitewash at the farmer when he swore at his wife for dropping the eggs and threatened to lick her. Wasn't he a sight!"

"He was!" admitted Brian. "And wasn't he mad? If he hadn't been a coward he would have licked me instead. As it was, I never fully understood why his wife shied an egg at me. However, that's all rather a shady part of my past. I'm not reminding you of the self-winding blunderbuss you got in part payment for chopping wood, am I? Or that it went off by itself and shot a cabbage?"

Laughing they struck off into a twilight stretch of woods, found a familiar clearing near a spring and made a fire.

"Well," said Brian when the fire was down to embers, "what's the schedule? You're road manager this week. What do we eat?"

"Sausages," said Donald, unloading his pockets. "A can of macaroni and an apple pie."

"You disgraceful kid!" exclaimed Brian. "Whenever you get into a country store without a guard you kick over the traces and appear with something in your pocket that busts a road rule and obligates me to a sermon when I hate 'em. Pie, my son, is effete and civilized. It's like feeding cream puffs to a wandering Arab. You're apt to make him stop his Arabing and hang around the spot where the cream puff grows. However, now that you've brought the thing into camp, it would be improvident not to eat it. What am I, Don, wood-scout or cook?"

"Cook," said Donald. "All day," he added, "you've been limping."

Brian made a fence of forked twigs, hung the sausages up to toast, opened the can of macaroni and set it in the embers. That Don had noticed the limp gratified him immensely, even though it had been a mere and prosaic matter of a blistered heel.

Whistling softly, he watched the boy gather wood. Well, thank God! he was as unlike that white-faced moody lad who had stumbled into his Tavern of Stars as a boy could be. He whistled a good deal. He was as slim as a sapling, the slimness of muscle and health. His eyes were clear and boyish. And there was color in his face. Best of all, to Brian's mind, after the first sullen period of readjustment he had worked his own salvation and reverted by wholesome instinct to boyhood with its inexhaustible animal vigor, its gaucheries and its boisterous minutes of frolic heretofore denied. Now save for the hours by the camp fire when he passionately blurted out again and again the tale of his rebellion until Brian knew his life as he knew the weather-lore of the open road, he seemed ever on the verge of laughter.

Brian smiled. Attuned to the mood he summed up the achievement of his own summer. The brawn of splendid health and a clear head! For the one he could thank his gypsying; for the other, in a measure, he could thank the boy.

In the lonely hours before he came with his problems there had been solitude less soothing than Brian had expected. There has been an inclination to smoke and brood and nurse certain sentimental misgivings about Kenny when the fire was low and the owls hooting in the forest. After, mercifully—for they might have driven him back to sunsets—there had been no time. The life of another had made its demand and sympathy with Brian was never passive. Impossible somehow not to romp with the young savage yonder rejoicing in his freedom, with even work a lark! Impossible not to laugh with him, fight out his battles with him and surrender with a sigh of content to the weariness and hunger of a caveman!

If now with autumn at hand the fortunes of the road had in them a grain more of hardship and less of romance, it was to be expected. Brian had tramped to his goal. The staleness was gone. It was time to be up and off, seeking Whitaker.

A sausage burst its casing with an appetizing sizzle and leaped, it seemed of its own accord, into suicidal embers. Brian rescued it with a stick and looked up. Don had come back with the wood.

"It's fall," said Brian. "The wind's full of it to-night. Last night I was cold."

"So was I," said Don. Brian thought he looked a little out-of-sorts.

"It narrows down to two things," said Brian, fishing in his pocket for some forks and spoons. "Either we must acquire another blanket or two or get a job and sleep under cover until—"

The boy's imploring eyes upset him. Brian turned a charred sausage and sighed. There was his problem, he knew: Don and his future. And they were barely twenty miles away from his uncle's farm.

"Remember the mountain quarry somewhere over there to the west?" he asked. "Suppose we hike over there in the morning and see if they need some brawny arms to help 'em crush stone. Seems to me there were a lot of shacks up back of it on the mountain. We could live in one of them."

"Yes."

"What's the matter?"

"Oh," said Don with an effort, "I'm a little blue. I suppose it's the fall."

They tramped west in the morning and climbed a winding road. The quarry lay ahead in the rocky wall of a mountain.

"Lord, what an out-of-the world spot!" exclaimed Brian in dismay. "Don, you thought we were getting too close to your uncle's farm but nobody'd find us here. I suspect they have to build shacks to keep the men contented. That basin of stone looks as if it had been gouged out of the mountainside by the hand of a giant."

A drill-runner was shouting to a man with a red flag as Brian climbed into the pit. The flagman waved him back. A second later a dull blast shook the quarry, earth and stone crumbled out of a fissure in the cliff ahead, and the suspended labor of men awaiting the Titan aid of inanimate force, turned to noise and bustle.

"Hum!" said Brian, glinting, "mostly dago labor. Well, that doesn't need to worry us, does it? You stay here, Don, while I find the boss."

Don obeyed. Derricks hung above the cars upon the spur track. Farther back a screen revolved and sorted stone. Men were feeding the crusher and men were busy at the drills but the boy's eyes, with an instinct for adventure, followed a man who drove a mule-cart along an overhanging ledge above the pit. The task held for him a fearful fascination.

"Needs men to load cars," announced Brian coming back, "and feed the crusher. In quarry caste I imagine that's about at the bottom. The shacks are furnished and four of them are empty. We can take our pick. What do you say?"

"Whatever you say," said Don.

"Well," said Brian, "to tell you the truth, I have the keys."

The quarry, he fancied as he climbed the path to the cluster of shacks, would solve his problem for him and when the time was ripe he would have his say.

The time ripened with frost in the morning and a harvest moon at night; and Brian had failed to have his say. A letter came from John Whitaker definite in detail and a shade impatient. Why was he loitering when God's green world of spring had turned to autumn? Was he still stale and thinking wrong?

Brian set his lips to his task and spoke.

"Don," he said one night when the dishes were washed, the shack swept and the lamp lighted, "I've been thinking a lot about you and what you're going to do this winter."

The boy, who had been sparring with a kitten that had strayed into the shack the day before, rose abruptly.

"You say you won't write to your sister until you've made good?"

"It isn't just that," stammered Donald, changing color. "I—I don't dare. She'd beg me to come back—"

Brian nodded.

"Yes," he said. "I know the feeling."

"And I won't go back!" flung out Donald passionately. "I won't go back. I simply can't."

"It's better," said Brian sensibly, "if you don't. For a number of reasons. But you must do something. I mean something with the future in view."

"Yes."

"As far as I can make out," went on Brian, puffing at his pipe, "you're wildly unhappy and discontented at the farm and that worries your sister. Of course your absence worries her too but the two letters we wrote that night you tumbled into my camp fire must have made her feel a lot better, particularly since we both expressed our intention of making the best of ourselves. You say she won't leave your uncle because he's an invalid. That leaves you without any string to your bow but your own inclination. In a sense you've followed that too long. I mean, Don, shirking the course of study the old minister mapped out for you when your sister kept on plugging. You need it."

"Nothing mattered," said the boy bitterly. "I knew I wouldn't stay. I didn't dare. Once," he added in a low voice, "when Uncle cursed my sister and threw a bottle of brandy at her, I made up my mind to kill him."

"Good Lord!" said Brian, shocked.

"That's one of the reasons I don't dare go back. I'm afraid. You can't guess what it is," he choked. "He taunts and jeers and curses in a breath and he gets drunk every night. I wish to God he would die!"

The wish was horrible in its sincerity. Brian ignored it.

"If you were older," said Brian, "and your chief need wasn't school, I'd take you abroad with me, free lancing. But in the circumstances, with your welfare somewhere else, that's impossible."

Donald hung his head.

"I—I wish it wasn't," he blurted. "I want to go wherever you go."

"That first night when I asked you to tramp along with me," said Brian gently, "I said, in my letter to your sister, that I'd see you through. That I'm going to do. But you've got to help me. I want you, after I'm gone, to stay up here at the quarry, study nights, and next year work your way through college."

The boy stared, blank terror in his eyes.

"A year's work will put you on your feet—your kind of work when the mood is on you—and you can enter in the fall. I know a chap who's working his way through Yale. He'd show you the ropes."

"Here!" said Donald. "Alone!"

"Here," said Brian quietly, "alone. I know you can do it."

Don brushed his hair back heavily from his forehead. It was but little browner than his face. The gesture reminded Brian irresistibly of Kenny, Kenny in rebellion.

"It isn't the college part," Don said hopelessly. "There I think I'd get through. And I'd like to be an engineer. It's the year here. An entrance examination would be stiff, wouldn't it, Brian?"

"Yes."

"I know chunks of a lot of things I don't need, almost nothing of things I ought to know a lot about. When I liked a thing, I studied. And when I didn't I let it slide. It worried my sister. And I work by fits and starts when there's nobody around to keep me at it. Up here alone, working all day and studying half the night, I'd never swing it. It would mean the hardest kind of work."

"Once," said Brian, "I saw you chop wood for thirteen hours."

"You were there."

"And down there in the quarry Grogan says you can load more stone to the hour than two wops."

"You're there feeding the crusher. And you work as hard as I do."

Brian rose. His pipe was out. He knew as he knocked the ashes into a saucer and filled again from a bowl of tobacco upon the mantel, that Donald's eyes were upon him, abject with misery and remorse. But neither spoke.

Irritable and upset, Brian went out upon the porch.

The straggling cluster of shacks around the rude store were dark. Grogan's weary men found bed early. The moonlight was calm and cold and weirdly bright. A wind mournful with the rustle of dead leaves came sharply from the trees behind the shack where by day the autumn sun touched russet into gold and scarlet. A bleak spot up here! The solitude of stone and struggle. Could he expect Don to linger here and fight his battle? Brian, with the weight of his years heavy on his shoulders, said honestly no. And the problem still was with him.

He went down the steps and walked aimlessly along the ridge above the quarry. The bright emptiness below was grotesque with shadow, shadows of ghost-like derricks, screens and drills. On the spur track lay a car half full of stone. Standing there with the trainload of Donald's labor at his feet, it came sharply to Brian that the boy stood again at the parting of the ways. And the year would tell.

To the right from the dank water of a quarry pool abandoned long since to catfish and willows, a milk-white mist was rising eerily into the moonlight. Brian saw it but he saw it indistinctly. He was thinking of the boy's sister, her sweet face tragic with imploring. It lay in the mist and yet not in the mist, and it was binding him to obligation. He had written a promise. That promise he must keep. The face his memory etched upon the mist made its appeal to every finer instinct of his courage.

Brian did not face his problem with excitement. He faced it with ruthless concentration. All summer he had been groping through fog and disillusion to the meaning of service, service to his fellowmen, and he had groped through to something vague and lofty. Service lay across the water where men raved in the red fever of destruction, service and inclination. Could not one be mercifully the religion of the other? Must service spring from the bitter dregs of self-denial? Brian stared wretchedly into the dank white mist curling in the moonlight like a fallen cloud. And again with his conscience up in arms he remembered the face of Donald's sister. In a sense he could thank the boy for the peace of his summer. And he had written his promise. He was like Kenny, that boy, inflammable of purpose, erratic in his vigor, and likable. And he needed a friend, inflexible and kindly.

"Always," said Brian, "I am slated to be somebody's keeper."

Could he shirk? Had he shirked when he left the studio in anger? Had he a right to live his life his own way? Had anybody? His common sense endorsed his earlier rebellion. This was different.

"Whenever you tell me I can do a thing and hang around to see me do it, I can seem to make myself do it somehow!"

The words echoed harshly in his ears; and at first Brian refused to hear them. Then inexorably he faced his fact. He and he alone was the spur to the boy's amazing energy. A year? Well, after all what was a year?

He went back through the autumn moonlight with a sigh.

"Don," he said, "you're right. You couldn't swing it up here alone. I'll stick and see you through it."

Don looked up, his face scarlet with emotion. Brian's hand was on his shoulder. And Brian's eyes were half humorous, half quizzical and wholly tender.

"No, no, Brian, no!" he choked. "I—I didn't mean that—"

"Of course you didn't," said Brian. "I thought that much of it out for myself."

Don's head went down upon his hands with a sob.

That night Brian wrote to Whitaker.



CHAPTER XIX

SAMHAIN

To Kenny in poetic mood the seasons were druidic. There was May Eve with its Bel fires when summer peeped over the hilltops at the cattle driven through the sacred flames to protect them from disease. There was Midsummer's Eve with more fires, and if St. Patrick in unpagan zeal had chosen to kindle his fires in honor of St. John, he could. To Kenny the festival was still druidic. There was Samhain or summer ending, when the November wind speeded the waning season with a flurry of dead leaves; and to Kenny, Samhain came and drove him forth in the chill dusk to face another problem.

He had come to the farm in blossom time and he had stared ahead to sanity—in September at the latest. Now with branches dark and bare against the glorious sunsets that burned at night in the west long after the valley was in shadow, even with talk in Hannah's kitchen of early snow, his madness was if anything a trifle more acute. Even the dreaded hours with Adam ceased to trouble him in the joy of his days. There was peace here and, thanks to Mr. Adams, who had simplified his relations with the bank, freedom from work and worry.

The November twilight, scintillant with stars, lay darkly ahead. He forged through it in excitement. He who could forecast with the wisdom of experience the duration of his own enslavement had gone over his time. And, powers of wild-fire, he still kept going! Something emotionally was wrong.

It pleased him in a moody moment to busy himself with mathematics, much as he hated them, and deduce a singular fact. He had spent delicious hours of many a day with many a maid. But days and days and days with one? Not ever!

For one hour he had spent with some forgotten object of his adoration in the past, he had spent five with Joan. The thought alarmed him. It came to this. If by rational reduction you translated each flare into hours, the vertigo of his summer with Joan became at once in contrast equivalent to years. And by every law his infatuation should have stopped the sooner. How much longer would it linger? What if Christmas still found him turbulent and upset—and hating the thought of the studio? This furlough of his from work and worry must come to an end in time!

Paralyzed by an infinite variety of prospects he stopped dead and stared at the fading red behind the hills. When had it altered—this madness of his? Why was it stronger? Any man addicted to falling in love knew well enough it shouldn't be.

It was his fate to remember as he stood there the talk of love around the wood-fire. He had barely listened. Yet now his memory cast up Kreiling's words and took his breath away.

"There is love and love and to be in love is torture and a thing of self but when the big splendid tenderness comes after the storm of self and craving, the tenderness that knows more of giving than of demanding, it comes to stay. But it's not the love of barbarity like Finn's. It's an evolution."

To stay! . . . The thought was volcanic. . . . To stay!

And yet . . . how different that first dizzy sweep of delight at the sight of Joan's loveliness, from this big, nameless something that filled his heart with humility and longing! . . . How far away that day beneath the willow when he had blown the horn! . . . An eternity lay between.

This love of his—no, it was no longer merely a storm of unrest. It was no longer merely a delirium of the senses in which he knew suffering no less than ecstasy. It was a big, kind, selfless tenderness that grew from day to day. A thing perhaps for eternity!

Kreiling was right.

Kenny's irreverent philosophy of the heart crumbled into ashes at his feet. Love he had once believed was poetic like summer lightning. It flashed, blinded in a glory of light and disappeared. If it lingered it would lose its mystery, It was a quest in which the emotion was paramount; the object that inspired it merely essential and subordinate. Love was the only thing in the world worth while but though a poet's love might fill his life with a perpetuity of delight the object was bound to be a variant. Kenny had often mourned for departed madness. He had never mourned the girl whom Chance had appointed to inspire it. Why mourn a flower that has bloomed and faded when the bush is full?

And marriage? That uncomfortable essential, legalists said, to civilization and the transmission of property? To Kenny marriage had always seemed a little like the Land of the Ever-Young. Mortals imprisoned there soon tired of exile and longed for freedom and distraction. His own marriage was but a memory he refused to face, dim and distant, an inexplicable flurry of sentimentality that had ended tragically with Brian in his arms. The brief year of it had been poignant and at the end he had gone forth upon the hills, praying for death. That girl of long ago with the black-lashed eyes of Irish blue like Brian's, he had loved with all the passionate tumult of boyhood; and in the end he had lived for Brian, coming to believe as life carelessly unfolded for him its book of heart-things that in time he must have tired. Lived for Brian! Had he? Or had he lived for himself?

The memory he had crushed out of his heart in a panic long ago, now left him with a terrified sense of obligation. Why in this dreadful moment of crisis when he had to think must even his memories accuse him? Brian! Brian! Always Brian!

The pang was spasmodic. The immensity of his love for Joan swept everything before it and filled him with terror and amazement. To stay! Any other thought was a profanation. And he must face another problem. If Joan's madness was the kind that waned, if for her there was no madness, if the summer had left her tranquil and indifferent. . . . The uncertainty maddened him.

He struck a match and glanced at his watch. It was supper time. In an hour now Joan likely would be coming to the cabin. So, alas! would Mr. Abbott. Kenny struck off hurriedly toward the south.

The cabin was dark and silent. He waited near it, endlessly it seemed, smoking and wondering if his heart would ever stop its nervous thumping. If only she would come! His head had begun to ache. His hand was shaking. Where the blood pounded in his wrists there was a flurried sense of pain. And somehow the heavy odor of the pines and the chill silence was depressing.

It was his fate to see Mr. Abbott come first. Unaware of the Irishman who drew back at his approach, his hot heart sick with disappointment, he opened the door of the cabin and went in, the inevitable book under his arm. A second later the cabin window with its shade drawn, sprang out of the shadow, a yellow checkerpane of light. Kenny stalked off, chafing intolerantly at the anticlimacteric tenor of his summer.

He saw her coming a long way off, her lantern bobbing along like a firefly, and walked faster. Impatience brought a cold sweat out upon his forehead and then he needs must call her name before she could hear.

"Joan!" he called a little later. The tenderness in his heart hurt.

The light faltered and became a fixed point in the darkness ahead.

"It is I, Kenny!" he called again.

Once more the firefly glimmer glided toward him.

"Kenny," called Joan in the darkness, "is it really you? You frightened me a little. And why in the world didn't you come home to supper? Hannah's wondering where you are."

But his voice failed him and with shaking hand he took the lantern and held it high above her head. If he could but read her eyes!

Joan glanced up at him in wonder and the hood of her cloak tumbling back upon her shoulders, bared her hair. It shone, in the lantern light, with an odd dark gold. She had never seemed so lovely—or so much a part of the lonely wood.

"Why do you stare so, Kenny?" she asked. "And why are you so—quiet?"

"Mavourneen!" said Kenny. And his eyes implored.

It was not at all what he had meant to say. The word, tell-tale in its tenderness, had seemed to speak itself.

Joan's face flamed. But her eyes were beautiful and kind.

Kenny dropped the lantern with a crash and caught her in his arms. She cried and clung to him in the darkness.

"Joan! Joan!" he said and kissed her.

He did not remember how long he stood there under the bright November stars with Joan in his arms and his face upon her hair. He knew his eyes were wet. He knew there was peace in his heart and a vast content. But something made him dumb and tongue-tied.

"Kenny!" exclaimed Joan. "The lantern!"

"I know, colleen," said Kenny, "but one lantern more or less in an epoch doesn't matter."

"Mr. Abbott will be waiting. Suppose he came to look for me."

"God forbid! I can't—I won't let you go."

"You must!"

"Joan, you are sure, sure you love me?"

"I know," said Joan steadily, "that I love you. I've known it since that night upon the lake when you first spoke of—going. I knew it when you went. And then when you came again. When I think of the farm without you it turns my heart to stone. Every minute that I—I am away from you, I am eager to be back."

"Bless your heart!"

She slipped out of his arms with a sigh. His hands clung to her.

"Truly, truly, Kenny, I must go!"

"I'll come back with another lantern after supper."

"No," said Joan. "Please don't. Mr. Abbott might scold. Besides, every star is a lantern to-night. And Uncle sent Hughie for you long ago."

Kenny groaned.



CHAPTER XX

THE CHAIR BY THE FIRE

He went with her as far as he dared, and turned back with shining eyes and stumbling feet. He did not afterward remember his supper or what he had eaten, though Hannah at his command had set the table in the kitchen and Hughie had talked sensibly of pumpkins. He did not remember climbing the stairs to Adam's room. The one thing that jarred through his dreamy feeling of detachment was the old man's face.

"You're late!" he said.

"Yes," said Kenny happily, "I am." Even now with Adam's piercing eyes upon him, he had a feeling of invincibility; as if, aloof in the aerial sphere in which he seemed to float, he could shut the old man out.

Adam stared at him with eagle-like intentness and a puzzled frown. His face said plainly that Kenny's mood was without precedent and therefore strategical. It behooved him to get to the bottom of it at once and be on his guard.

"'Tis Samhain, Adam," said Kenny, "the summer ending of the druids. And to-night the hills are open and the fairies are all out a-temptin' mortals. I myself have heard the fairy pipes showerin' sweetness everywhere. Wonderful music, Adam! Silver-soft and allurin' and the kind you can't forget! It throws you into a trance and fills you with beautiful longing. I forgot to come home. There! I must tell Hannah to put a light under the churn to-night. Then the fairies, hating fire, can't bewitch it."



Adam stared at him blankly. He was in mad mood, this Irishman. His eyes, ardently blue and tender and intense, danced with incautious gleams of laughter. His color was high. He was gay and utterly friendly.

An odd jealous hunger sprang up in the invalid's eyes.

"Are you mad?" he demanded.

"Quite!" said Kenny.

"More like," said the old man tartly, "you're drunk."

"Drunk," nodded Kenny, "with heather ale. Only the fairies know how to make it now. And who wouldn't be drunk in the head of him to-night with the Good People dancing on the hills and the dead dancing with them."

Adam frowned and shivered.

"You Irish," he said harshly, "are as morbid as you are poetic."

"'Tis all a part of the night," cried Kenny gayly and poured himself some brandy. "The druids," he remembered, "poured libations on the ground to propitiate the evil spirits and the spirits of the dead; but, Adam, I'm drinking to-night to Destiny! To Destiny," he added under his breath, "and the foreverness of her gift!"

"What gift," demanded Adam Craig, "are you trying to clinch with a gift to yourself of my brandy?"

"The gift," said Kenny cryptically, "of—Life!"

Well, he had spoken truth there. Life was love and love was life and perhaps until now he'd known neither.

Still the old man stared at him in dazed and sullen envy. His wild vitality seemed a barrier impossible to surmount.

"And it isn't just Samhain," said Kenny, setting down his glass. "Ugh, Adam, your brandy's abominable! It's the Eve of All Souls. To-night the dead revisit their homes. Once I remember when I was tramping through Ireland, an old woman left a chair by the fireside that the spirit of her son might come back to her. She even left some embers in the fire."

"That," said Adam Craig with a shudder, "will be enough of your damned ghosts and fairies."

Afterward to Kenny the evening was always a blur but he knew they had gotten on badly. And Adam, quiet and sullen, had drunk more than usual.

Kenny sparkled through the evening in a baffling, dreamlike oblivion to everything but his thoughts, and floated away to his room, feeling curiously light and iridescent.

He meant not to sleep. He meant to roll the shades to the top and with the cold wind upon his face and the stars winking in silver beneficence overhead, to lie awake and think until the dawn came. He slept soundly, dreaming of thistledown and a little old woman in a green cloak who came out of a hill and played a tune upon a sort of lantern-flute. The notes had winged off in bars of music written in fire against the darkness. He had not finished the dream when he was awakened by someone knocking at his door.

It was Hughie, his face pale and disturbed.

"Mr. O'Neill," he said, "I'm wondering if you'd drive down to the village and telephone the doctor to come here first. Mr. Craig's had a bad fall. He's unconscious."

"Unconscious!" exclaimed Kenny, changing color. "How on earth, Hughie, did he fall?"

"I don't know," said Hughie sadly. "He must have climbed out of bed in the night."

"But, Hughie, he couldn't!"

"He could stagger a step or two," explained Hughie. "Not far. The trouble's in his spine. But he never dragged himself so far before."

"How far?"

"From his bed to his sitting room. I found him in a heap by the fire."

"Poor devil!" said Kenny, shocked.

He dressed quickly. Hannah helped him hitch the old mare to the buggy and found him nervous and unfamiliar with his task. Kenny drove off down the lane, oppressed by the bleak wind and the bare black tangle of branches ahead of him. The tragic effort of Adam's wasted legs had left him startled and uneasy. For the life of him he could not put out of his mind the tale of the old Irish woman and the chair she had left by the fire on the Eve of All Souls for the visit of her dead son. It had bothered Adam Craig and made him shudder. It bothered Kenny now. He wished he hadn't remembered it last night or to-day. But the sound of Nellie's hoofs plodding along the soft dirt road was no more recurrent than his own foreboding. It filled him with sadness and guilt. Adam perhaps had dragged himself to the sitting room fire in a drunken fit of superstition. Seeking what? Someone he had wronged? The sinister spark inflamed his fancy. His brain whirled. Inexplicably the tale of the fairy mill and the rascal who stole the widow's bag of meal linked itself with the mishap of the night before. Then too Adam had fallen forward in his chair unconscious.

Nellie stumbled and jolted Kenny into sanity. He put his thoughts aside in horror. But dreadful strings of mystery converged persistently to one point: Adam Craig, the pitiful old miser who for some reason huddled every book in the farmhouse on his shelves. Fate cruelly had brought melancholy into this, the first morning of his love. Kenny shivered with resentment.

He telephoned the doctor's farm and found him ready to start his weary ambulant day; hamlet to hamlet, farm to farm, until dusk and often after. The bare thought of it filled Kenny with sympathetic gloom. Then his brain began again to burn in speculation. Frowning, he turned back homewards up the hill and through the wood, where the road lay, rough and lonely.

With his mind upon it he evolved Nellie from her harness and led her into the stall. When he had done with her halter he found that Joan had slipped into the barn and stood a little way off, her soft eyes intent upon him.

"Joan!" he exclaimed radiantly. The sight of her was like a lilac wind in fog. The fog fled and you found the world clear and fragrant.

She came to him instantly, her face like a colorless flower, a faint shadow in her eyes.

"Colleen!" said Kenny. He kissed her gently. Again he was conscious with a flurried feeling of impatience that the force of his tenderness would not rise to his lips. He whose words of love had been so fluent and poetic!

"Hannah sent me," said Joan. "She was afraid you wouldn't know how to get Nellie out of the shafts. Oh, Kenny!" There was quick compassion in her eyes.

"Let's not think of sorrowful things, dear!" said Kenny swiftly. "I dreamed of a lantern."

"And I," said Joan, the rich rose tints he loved flaming in her face, "I dreamed of you."

Kenny choked back the tender untruth he would have liked to utter. For an instant he hated the little old fairy in the green cloak who had come forth from the hill in his dream. How easy for the dream-god to have made her—Joan!

"Joan," he said wistfully, "you're sure you love me!"

"Yes," said Joan. "There is no one in my life I love so well."

"And it will last?"

Disturbed she glanced at him, her eyes dark with rebuke.

"Until the judgment day!" persisted Kenny.

"Kenny," she said, "why do you speak so strangely. Love is love, isn't it? And if you who have known all things love me, how much more must I who have lived so much alone, love and cling to you?"

He kissed her hair and pressed his cheek against it where the shadows were soft and golden.

"I want you, heart of mine," he said steadily, "to love me in this wonderful way that I love you. There are ways and ways of loving."

That, in her girlhood dream of love, she could not see. And Kenny was passionately glad that his words were a riddle.

Then the horn came, clear and mellow, through the cold November air and Joan drew the hood of her cloak about her head.

Kenny sighed. He clung to her hand as she started away.

"Girleen," he said soberly, "the wind's cold. Must you ferry the river in winter, too?"

"Save when there's ice," said Joan. "The bridge is three long miles away."

From the barn doorway he watched the flutter of her cloak as she hurried down the path to the river.



CHAPTER XXI

THE SHADOW OF DEATH

Kenny went back to the kitchen, hungry and depressed. To his fancy, as eager at times in its morbidity as in its lighter sparkle, the shadow of death seemed brooding over the farmhouse. This an hour later the weary little doctor confirmed. He had tired shadows around his eyes, that doctor; he seemed always bored to death at the proneness of mankind to ills and aches and babies; and his kind tired voice never lost its drawl no matter what the crisis.

"It isn't just the spine trouble, Mr. O'Neill," he said. "With that alone he'd likely linger on for years. And it isn't the trouble here in his chest. That's chronic and unimportant. It's the brandy. He drinks a quart a night and he won't give it up."

"I know."

The doctor shook his head and pursed his lips.

"I think he'll just slip away without regaining consciousness. Pulse is barely a flutter. Joan can tend him. She's done it before. Every now and then for a good many years he's had a bedfast spell. Poor child!" The doctor cleared his throat. "Well, Mr. O'Neill, such is life! I'll stop back to-night on my way home."

Distraught and rebellious, Kenny fought the girl's refusal to let Hannah take her place. She hid the mended gown he hated under an apron of Hannah's, slipped into his arms and out again with tears upon her cheeks, and fled from his protestations with her hands upon her ears. Kenny followed her to the door of Adam's sitting room, frantic with distress. Verily, he thought, as the door closed gently in his face, the quality of Joan's mercy was not strained. It came like Portia's gentle rain from Heaven. It forgot and forgave and condoned. But the thought of her, flowerlike in the shadow of death, was unendurable.

Anxious to help, Kenny sculled the old punt back and forth, whenever the horn blew, until dusk. He had humbly pledged himself to curb a tendency to speed and excitement and therefore ferried the river well until a wind rose at twilight, clouds thickened overhead and a spatter of rain blew into his face. Then his patience waned and he tacked an enormous sign upon the willow under one of Hughie's lanterns. Owing to illness, it said, the ferry had been discontinued. Afterward he went to tell Joan what he had done, and met the doctor on the stairway.

"By morning," he nodded slowly, answering Kenny's look. "Yes, I'm afraid he'll be gone. I'd like to stay, Mr. O'Neill, for Joan's sake. But there's a baby coming over at the Jensen farm. There always is. And my duty as I see it is more with life than with death."

"I'll stay with him," said Kenny. "Joan must rest."

But she would not.

"Donald should be here too," she said. "We are all he has."

"Then," said Kenny, his lips white, "I shall stay here with you."

The night closed in with gusty showers of rain. There was no sound from the high old-fashioned bed where Adam Craig lay, gray and still. The silence, the gloom of dark wood, the grotesque shadows from a lamp burning dimly on the bureau and the loud licking of the clock drove Kenny with a shudder to the window. Death to him who so passionately loved life's gayety and its music was more a thing of horror than of grief. He found no solace in the wind and rain of the autumn night. They plunged him instead into a mood of morbid imagery. The weird music of the wind became Ireland's cry of lament for her dead. The tossing boughs beyond the window, rain-spattered and somber, took on eerily the outline of dark-cloaked women keeners rocking and chanting the music of death. The rain was tears.