Ochone! Ochone! The wind of sorrow rose and fell, rose and fell, with unearthly cadence. Kenny thought of the horrible Dullahaun who roves about the country with his head under his arm and a death-warning basin of blood in his hand ready to dash in the face of the unlucky wight who answers his knock.

He shuddered and choked. Then Joan slipped into the shelter of his arm, terrified at the thought of death, cried and watched the rain with him.

Adam Craig died at dawn with the rain he hated beating at the window. And peace came wanly to his wrinkled face.



CHAPTER XXII

IN THE CABIN

They were hard days for Kenny, who hated gloom save when it was picturesque and transient. And they were harder for the pity and misgiving in his heart. He himself perhaps had hastened the old man's death with a careless story. Why had it bothered him? Why had it goaded his wasted legs to horrible effort?

Ordinarily Kenny knew he would have resented the intrusion of alien sorrow into his life. He hated sorrow. Now for Joan's sake he made himself a part of it. If Joan must endure it, so could he. But he sickened at the need.

He was doomed to a tragic, unforgettable hour in the churchyard when the voice of the old minister, conventional in its sadness, droned wearily into his very soul:

"Ashes to ashes . . . dust to dust." . . . The clock turned back and he stood in a church by an Irish hill. White and terrified, Kenny remembered what in its vivid agony of detail he would fain have forgotten. Why, now, when Joan was slipping into his life, a lonely waif of a girl in a black gown he hated, why must he think years back to that soft-eyed Irish girl and Brian? Had he broken his pledge to her, driving her son away with a passion of self no less definite for its careless gayety? Eileen's son! Eileen's son! Sadness tore at Kenny's heart and twitched at his dry, white lips. Ah! why must he live again that agonizing day when Eileen had gone out of his life forever?

The voice went on, funereal, gentle. Kenny's eyes blurred. Sweat came coldly forth upon his forehead. At the first thud of earth he choked and turned away, the pain unbearable. Adam Craig had driven his nephew away . . . with a passion of self . . . and he had died with mercy at his bedside, not love. A passionate hunger for Brian stirred in Kenny's heart and made him lonely. Ah! how farcical his penance! Some nameless thing of self linked him to Adam Craig. The thought was horrible. Some nameless thing linked each mournful detail of to-day to the tragedy of long ago. . . . And then mercifully the thing became a blur of November wind, a monotonous voice of sorrow, the thud of earth and the end.

The coach toiled up the hill and Kenny, with Joan in his arms, forgot.

"Mavourneen," he said wistfully, "let's slip away, you and I, to the cabin in the pines. I want you to myself. And there in the house—" he looked away. The thought of the old house, bleak and desolate at its best and haunted now by the sense of a presence gone, oppressed him.

Joan nodded.

"And not that dress!" begged Kenny with a shudder.

She laid her cheek against his shoulder.

"It was just for to-day, Kenny. Hannah thought it best." Her soft eyes, curiously child-like with the shadow of sadness in them, appealed to him for understanding. He kissed her, marveling afresh at the tender miracle of peace and tenderness her presence brought him.

"Had I loved Uncle a great deal more—it isn't wrong for me to say that now, Kenny?"

"It would be wrong, dear, if you made pretense of something you couldn't feel."

"I—I meant that even then I could have mourned him better with my heart than this—this dreadful dress. It would carry gloom wherever I went. And that would be selfish."

He blessed her shy intelligence and kissed her again. Then the carriage stopped at the farmhouse door and Kenny hurried up to his room to find clothes less formal and depressing. Afterward he went ahead to the cabin and built a fire.

The crackle of the wood was lively to his ears and cheerful. The room grew, warm and homelike. When Joan came a little later, he was whistling softly and making tea. He liked her dress. It was dark and soft. He liked the lace fichu at her throat. And he liked the huge old-fashioned cameo that fastened it.

"Hughie is hunting the key to the table-drawer," she said. "I told him about the cabin. It doesn't matter now. Poor Uncle!" She blinked and wiped her eyes. "He didn't mean to be cruel, Kenny. It was the brandy and the pain. If Hughie finds the key, he wondered if you'd go over Uncle's papers to-night. The will is there."

"The will!" said Kenny. He put wood on the fire in some excitement. A miser's will!

Joan's eyes were tender.

"Kenny, how good you've been!"

"Nonsense!" he said brusquely.

"Hughie said so, too. And Hannah and Hetty. Someone had to think and plan and you did it all so well. And, Kenny, I told Hannah, that I'm going to marry you and she cried and kissed me and—and poured a wash-bowl full of tea for Hughie to wash his hands in!"

"The heart of her!" said Kenny. "Come, girleen. The tea's ready. I want to see you pour it."

He watched with his heart in his eyes while she poured his tea. There was a sense of home in the cabin here and the crackle of the fire was the music of comfort. Kenny drank a little of his tea and roved off to the window to light a cigarette.

Beyond the November monotone of trees blazed the red of a sunset. A winter sunset! The fall was over.

"Joan!" he called softly. "Come, jewel machree, the Gray Man is stealing through the pines."

She came at once and slipped into the circle of his arm. Kenny held her tight and found his courage. He was restless, it seemed, and after months of irresponsibility, the thought of work was bothering him badly. Kenny must leave the farm. He must go soon; in a week. And his wife must go with him.

Joan's breathless amazement made him laugh.

"But, Kenny, I—I can't!" she said.

"And I," said Kenny stubbornly, "can't and won't go away and leave you here. The thought of winter and the hills and that barn of a house when the wind is blowing would haunt me. No, no, girleen!"

Joan looked up and smiled and her soft eyes were wistful.

"Kenny, I must study for another year!"

"Another year!" said Kenny blankly. "Colleen, you've the wisdom of the ages in your head right now."

Joan shook her head.

"I must learn to be your wife," she said. "Now it—it dazzles and frightens me—"

"Joan!"

"Have you forgotten, Kenny, that I have lived my life up here in hills and trees. And you—"

"Joan, please!" he begged in distress.

"But I can't forget," said the girl steadily. "Whenever I read the article Garry sent about 'Kennicott O'Neill, brilliant painter'—think of it, Kenny! 'Brilliant painter!'—I go back and read again just to be sure I'm not dreaming. I've been so much alone that the thought of going out into your world with you—terrifies me. I could not bear to have you—sorry!"

"Mavourneen!" he said, shocked.

There were tears upon her cheeks.

"I would only ask that you be your own dear self," said Kenny gently. "And every man of my world and every woman will stare and envy!"

"I must know music and French," said Joan, checking the need upon her fingers. "I must know how to dance. Now when I talk I must have something to say. Otherwise I feel shy and quiet. I must learn how to talk a great deal without saying anything as you do sometimes."

He laughed in delight at the final need.

"All of it," declared Kenny happily, "I can teach you."

"No," said Joan with a definite shake of her head. "You would kiss me. And I would always be right even when you knew I was wrong."

His eyes laughed at her mischievously. But he caught her hands and pressed them to his lips.

"Listen, dear," he pleaded. "My world isn't a world of social climbers or snobs or dollar-worshippers. It's a world of gifted men and women who haven't time to look up your ancestors or your bank balance before they decide to be friendly and kind. I know a poet whose mother was a gypsy, a painter who's a baron and he says he can't help it, a French girl who paints millionaire babies and her father was a tight-rope walker in a circus. My world, Joan, is the happy-go-lucky Bohemia of success and the democracy of real talent. We're actors and painters and sculptors and writers and artists in general and all in all I think we work a little more and play a little more, enjoy a little more and suffer a little more than the rest of the world. Once in a while to be sure a head grows a bit too big and then we all take a bop at it! But the big thing is we're human; just folks, as a man in the grillroom said one night. We're human and we're kind. It's not a smart set, dear. And it's not an ultra-fashionable four-hundredy thing. God forbid! It's the kind of Bohemia I love. And I'm sure you'll love it too."

Her eyes were shining. In the dusk her color came to him like the glimmer of a flower.

"Kenny!" she exclaimed. "How wonderful it all is, you and all of it! And yet if—if I feel as I do, you must let me go for a year. Otherwise if I lack confidence in myself—Oh, can't you see, Kenny, I shall be shy and frightened and always ill at ease!"

"Go!" he echoed blankly.

"Somewhere," said Joan, "to study music and French and how to talk your kind of nonsense. Hannah says there must be money enough in Uncle's estate for that."

"Where," said Kenny, his heart cold, "would you go?"

"I thought," said Joan demurely, "that perhaps I could study in New York where I wouldn't be so—lonesome."

He caught her in his arms.

"Heart of mine!" he whispered. "You thought of that."

"Then," said Joan, "I can learn something of your world before I become a part of it. Don't you see, Kenny? I can look on and learn to understand it. I should like that. Come, painter-man! The tea's cold. And it's growing dark. We'd better light the lamp."

With the tea-pot singing again on the fire and the lamp lighted, Kenny, but momentarily tractable, had another interval of rebellion. Joan, in New York, might better be his wife. Joan, studying, might better have him near to talk his sort of nonsense, listen to her music and make love volubly in French to which she needed the practice of reply. His plea was reckless and tender but Joan shook her head; and Kenny realized with a sigh that her preposterous notion of unfitness was strong in her mind and would not be denied.

"A year, Kenny!" pleaded Joan. "After all, what is a year? And at the end I shall be so much happier and sure." She came shyly to his chair and slipped her arms around his neck. "I want so much to do whatever you want me to do. And yet—and yet, Kenny, feeling as I do, I shall be—Oh, so much happier if you will wait until I can come and say that I am ready to be your wife."

"It will make you happier!" he said abruptly.

"Yes."

"Then, mavourneen," said Kenny, "it shall be as you say. I care more for your happiness than for my own."

They went back through the darkness hand in hand.



CHAPTER XXIII

A MISER'S WILL

Kenny lingered moodily over his supper. His evening was casting its shadow ahead. He dreaded the thought of climbing the stairs to Adam's empty room. If he could have kept his hostile memories in the face of death, he told himself impatiently, it would have been easier. But Garry was right. He was wild and sentimental. Only pitiful memories lingered to haunt him: rain and loneliness and the old man's hunger for excitement.

He went at last with a sigh, oppressed by the creak of the banister where Adam had sat, sinister and silent in his wheel-chair, listening to the music. Memories were crowding thick upon him. Again and again he wished that he had never opened the door of the sitting room that other night and caught the old man off his guard. It had left a specter in his mind, horrible in its pathos and intense. Strung fiercely to the thought of emptiness, it came upon him nevertheless, as he opened the door, with a curious chill sense of palpability; as if silence and emptiness could strike one in the face and make him falter.

The room was fireless and silent and unspeakably dreary. Hughie had left a lamp burning upon the table. The key he had found in the pocket of the old man's bathrobe lay beside it.

For an interval Kenny stood stock still, his color gone. He faced strange ghosts. Here in this faded room, with its mystery of books, he had known agonizing pity and torment, gusts of temper, selfish and unselfish, real and feigned, moments of triumphal composure that now in the emptiness it was his fate to remember with a sickening shudder of remorse. Here he had battled in vain for Joan, practicing brutally the telling of much truth; and here with his probing finger, Adam Craig had roused his slumbering conscience into new doubt and new despair. And here he must not forget he had told the tale of the fairy mill . . . and suspicion had come darkly to his mind. Suspicion of what? That, as ever, he refused to face.

A chair stood by the fireplace. Kenny with a shudder moved it to a distant corner. He could not bear the memory of that last night when he had barred the old man out from his joyous mood of sparkle, telling Samhain tales of the fairies and the dead.

After all, had he meant always to be cruel, that keen-eyed old man with his keener wits? What conflict of spirit and body had lain behind his fretful fits of temper?

Kenny turned, blinking, from the wheelchair, and his glance, blurred a little, found the old man's glasses on the mantel. The shabby case, left behind while Adam faced the great adventure, was oddly pitiful. Kenny cleared his throat. He had his moment of rebellion then at the inevitability of death and doom. It behooved all of us, he remembered with set lips, to be kind and mend quarrels while the sap of life ran in our veins, strong and full.

The sight of the key upon the table sent his thoughts flying off at a tangent. A miser's will! . . . Mother of Men! It was a thing of morbid mystery and romance!

Kenny sat down in wild excitement and opened the drawer.

He saw at once an orderly packet of papers. The will, which barely a month ago, Hughie said, he and Hannah had signed without reading, lay uppermost. Adam had written his will himself, disdaining lawyers.

Kenny opened the will and began to read. He read as he always read in moments of excitement, blurring through with a glance. But though the old man's writing was distinct and almost insolent in its boldness, the portent of the written words did not filter through at once to his understanding. He frowned and read again. Once more he read, pacing the floor with unquiet eyes. A number of things were becoming clearer. There was in the first place no mention of the fugitive nephew. Joan was the sole heir. There was one executor. That executor was Joan's guardian and Joan's guardian was one—Kennicott O'Neill! Kenny read the name aloud as if it belonged to someone else. Joan's guardian! Again he read the clause aloud with an exclamation of doubt and unbelief. It lay there definite and clear. He was the sole executor of Adam's will and he was Joan's guardian. Startled he read the rest.

"To Kennicott O'Neill, my friend, my signet ring . . . to my niece, Joan West, from whom, no matter what the circumstances, I have never had an unkind word, I bequeath the Craig farm and all the land and all the rest, residue and remainder of my wealth wheresoever situate, provided the executor can find it."

Kenny went back with a feeling of numbness in his brain and read it all again.

"The rest of my wealth wheresoever situate . . . provided the executor can find it!"

Those words he scanned blankly with a feeling of much fire in his head and a tantalizing cloud before his eyes. They meant what? Strange hints and subtle smiles recurred to him. . . . And Adam had been a miser who read of buccaneers and hidden treasure. . . . Buccaneers and hidden treasure! . . . He would have hidden pirates' gold, he had said, under the biggest apple-tree in the orchard, under the lilac bush or . . . Where else had he said? . . . And . . what . . had . . he . . meant?

Kenny struck his head fiercely with his hand, raked his hair in the old familiar gesture and roamed turbulently around the room with the will in his hand. He was conscious of that dangerous alertness in his brain that with him always presaged some unusual clarity of vision, a startling speed with the adding of two and two. Four came now with bewildering conviction. Fragments of the puzzle of mystery that had bothered him for days dropped dizzily into place, even the fairy mill and the Eve of All Souls. What wonder that in a drunken fit of superstition Adam had staggered out to seek his dead!

With his hair in disarray from the frantic combing of his fingers, Kenny went down to find Joan. He read the will aloud to her, controlling his voice with an effort.

"Don shall have the farm," said Joan. "I shouldn't know what to do with it."

Kenny read the baffling clause at the end of the will again.

"'All the rest, residue and remainder of my wealth, wheresoever situate, provided the executor can find it.'"

It seemed to him in his excitement that he could not tell her what he thought—that he could not say it all with care and calm when his head was whirling.

"Joan," he said gently, "you must tell me everything you remember about your mother and your father and your uncle. And whether there was ever money. Much money," he insisted, his vivid face imploring.

Joan shook her head sadly.

"There is so little I remember, Kenny," she said. "So very little. There was never money. I do not remember my mother or my father. Neither does Donald. We lived until I was eight with an old cousin, Nellie Craig. She said that uncle was a miser who loved nothing but his brandy. Then she died and we came here. We had to come. There was no other place for us. I remember that Don's clothes and mine were always ragged until I grew old enough to mend them. Then I found mother's trunks in the garret. Later Don and I thought of the ferry and had for the first time some money of our own."

Kenny looked crestfallen.

"And there is nothing more?" he said. "Think, Joan, think!"

"Nothing," said Joan. "Donald and I were afraid of Uncle. We never dared to ask him questions. And he never spoke of my mother save to sneer and curse the stage. What is it, Kenny? What are you thinking?"

"I think," said Kenny, making a colossal effort to speak with the calm he could not feel, "that somewhere buried on the farm is a great deal of money. I think it belonged to your mother and that it was left in trust to your uncle for Donald and you—"

"Kenny!"

"I think," went on Kenny steadily, "that this singular clause in your uncle's will was a miser's struggle between justice and his instinct for hoarding and hiding. Money he had kept so long he hated to relinquish. Yet he dared not keep it. And so he buried the money. God knows how or where, and shunted the responsibility of its finding upon me. If it was never found, as perhaps he hoped, he had still fulfilled his trust and the dictates of his conscience in willing the money back to you."

"But, Kenny, how could he bury it?"

"How often," reminded Kenny, "has Hughie in summer wheeled him out to the orchard and left him there? How often has he wheeled himself around the walk by the lilac bush? And he was clever and cunning. Could he not, from time to time, hide the money in his bathrobe and find some means of digging?"

Joan looked unconvinced.

"And where," she said, "would my mother, who earned her living on the stage, get money? A great deal, I mean?"

"I—I don't know," said Kenny, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "I wish I did. Sometime or other, Joan, there has been Craig money and a lot of it. This old house is the house of an aristocrat with money enough to gratify expensive whims. Either the money was willed to her or with the beauty she must have had, she married it. They are the things you and I must find out somehow. Of one thing I am absolutely convinced. There is money. It did not belong to your uncle. It is hidden somewhere on the farm."

He told her of the fairy mill, of the old man's gloating pride in the word miser, of All Souls' Eve and Adam Craig's hints about the apple tree and the lilac bush.

"And many another place," added Kenny bitterly, "that slipped by me for I didn't listen!"

"It is unlikely," Joan said, "that he would find the opportunity for hiding money in so many places. Why then did he name them all?"

"His conscience forced him to give some inkling of the spot where he had hidden money not his own. But he purposely multiplied our chances of failure. Joan, I've got to get a spade and dig up the apple-tree!"

His excitement was contagious. Neither of them heard Hughie in the doorway until he spoke.

"Mr. O'Neill," he said eagerly, "have you read the will?"

Kenny struck himself upon the forehead and stared at Hughie in genuine resentment. Hughie was another problem. But Hughie's quiet eyes pleaded; and Hughie's ruddy face was honest. Kenny told him all.

"I'm not surprised," said Hughie. "From the minute I set foot here three years back, I said, and Hannah said, that Mr. Craig was a miser. And it's common talk in the village."

But Kenny was off through the doorway with the will in his hand. Joan and Hughie followed him to the kitchen.

Here when the will had been read again commotion seized them all. Hughie went out to the barn to hunt a spade, Hannah trotted about talking of wraps, Hetty found a lantern for Kenny and Kenny burned his fingers lighting it, and stepped on the cat. Joan soothed the outraged feline with a nervous laugh. There was madness in the air. In an interval of blank disgust in which he criticized the length of the cat's tail and the clarion quality of his yell, Kenny fumed off barnwards in search of Hughie. His excitement was compelling. Hannah headed a cloaked exodus from the kitchen, chirping an astonishment which she claimed was unprecedented in her quiet life.

They straggled up the orchard hill in a flutter.

It was snowing a little. The coldness of the air was soft and heavy. Hannah and Hughie held the lanterns high and with a startling attack that made the dirt fly, Kenny began to dig.

The lantern light rayed off grotesquely through the leafless orchard but the silent group, intent upon the energetic digger, watched only the spot where the fan-like rays converged upon the spade. The wind, sharp, intermittent and bringing with it now and then a flurry of snow, flapped their clothes about them. Kenny, pausing to wipe his forehead, thought the night warm. Joan's eyes, dark, solemn, frightened, spurred him on to greater effort. He dug furiously, flinging earth in all directions. Hughie marvelled at his madcap speed and the strength of his sinewy arms. His jaw was set. His face, dark and vivid in the lantern light, shone with a boy's excitement. But when the wind came he looked defiant. They could not know that to him, then, the spirit of Adam Craig seemed to come with a sigh and a rustle and hover near them.

Hughie took his turn at the spade but to Kenny his methodical competence proved an irritant. He was glad when Hughie's back gave out and forced him to surrender.

"Mr. O'Neill," said Hannah flatly after what seemed an interminable interval of digging, "you've dug a hole big enough to bury yourself. Mr. Craig's money couldn't be no further down than that. Myself I think you'd better let it go until morning. It's snowin' harder every minute and we'll all get our death of cold."

Kenny shuddered at the homely phrase. But he wiped the dirt and perspiration from his forehead and went off toward the kitchen in gloomy silence, his energy and optimism gone.



CHAPTER XXIV

DIGGING DOTS

So madness settled down upon the Craig farm.

Futile, flurried days of digging followed for which Kenny, delving desperately in his memory, supplied forgotten clues. Fearful lest the villagers might take it into their heads to climb the hill to Craig Farm and help them dig, he pledged every one to secrecy and went on digging, with Hughie at his heels. The suspense became fearful and depressing.

On the third day Hannah rebelled. The gloom and mystery were getting on her nerves.

"Hetty," she said irritably, "if you're standin' at the window there, figurin' out where Mr. Craig's money is likely to be buried, you can stop it this minute and clean the lamps. Your father's out pulling up the floor-boards in the barn and Mr. O'Neill's digging up the lilac bush for the third time. And that's enough. It beats me how Mr. O'Neill can go on rememberin' so much now he's got his memory started. He just seems to unravel things out of it overnight. It keeps me all worked up. I feel as if I ought to whisper when I speak and every night the minute I get to sleep I find myself diggin' in first one outlandish place and then another. And if I'm not diggin' in my sleep, your father is, with jerks and starts and grunts enough to wake the dead. I'm all unstrung. So far as I can see the only thing we're findin' is nerves. One thing I will say: It was dull and lonesome before Mr. O'Neill came and I missed him when he went but dear knows, it was peaceful. It's been one thing right after the other. Who upset Mr. Abbott in the river, I'd like to know, and almost hit him in the head with an oar? Who kept Mr. Craig so upset that he threw his brandy bottle at your father most every morning? Who sang the roan cow into kickin' at the milk? Who—"

"Sh!" said Hetty.

It seemed that Mr. O'Neill at that minute was not digging up the lilac bush. There was a sound of hurried footsteps in the room beyond and he came in with a piece of letter paper in his hand.

"Look, Hannah," he cried. "Look! I found it among Mr. Craig's papers. It's a rude chart of the farm, picked out here and there in dots."

Hannah wiped her arms and put on her glasses. The paper filled her with excitement.

"Sakes alive, Mr. O'Neill," she exclaimed, "what will you do now?"

"Do?" said Kenny wildly. "Do? There's only one thing to do, of course. Hughie and I will dig up the dots. I wish to Heaven I could find a Leprechaun somewhere under a thorn-bush."

"What's a Leper John?" demanded Hannah.

"A fairy shoemaker," explained Kenny absently, "in a red coat and he wears buckled shoes and knee-breeches and a hat with a peak and always he's mendin' a shoe that he doesn't finish, find him and never once let him trick you into lookin' away and he'll tell you where treasure is hidden, always."

Hannah blinked.

"What ye need most to my mind, Mr. O'Neill," she said earnestly, "is a regiment of grave-diggers and stone-cutters to help you and Hughie get the thing done."

Night came upon them with Hughie digging up a dot beside the well and Kenny again in the orchard. Everything led back somehow to the orchard, his memory, the chart, even his own conviction.

That night in a dream Kenny distinctly saw the weary little doctor with a bag of mystery in his hand and a spade over his shoulder walking down the orchard hill.

He awoke at dawn with a shiver of excitement. The doctor! What could be more reasonable? Adam had known him for a lifetime. Whom else would he trust? The thought nerved him to heroics.

Kenny climbed out of bed and dressed, shiveringly conscious that the morning was cold enough to turn his breath to steam. It was that period of indistinctness moreover when farmers and roosters, he knew, were getting up all over the dawn, but Kenny, with little time and no inclination at all for melancholy rebellion, tip-toed down the stairway with his shoes in his hand. He put them on by the kitchen fire. There was water by the window in a milk-pail. He poured some in a basin, washed his face and hands and found the water cold enough to hurt his face. Still his excitement kept him keyed to a pitch of singular and optimistic hilarity. Through the kitchen window came the pale glimmer of snow. He hoped Hughie wouldn't hear him harnessing Nellie, and shoot at the barn. The possibility sent him to the kitchen stairway. It wound upward in an old-fashioned twist to the room above.

"Hughie!" he called in a low voice. "Hughie!"

There was a noise of many creaks overhead.

"I'm going to hitch up Nellie and drive over to Dr. Cole's farm. I—I feel sure he buried the money!"

"God Almighty!" exclaimed Hughie.

But Kenny was already on his way to the kitchen door.



CHAPTER XXV

CHECKMATE!

Daylight came bleak and cold as Kenny drove rapidly up the doctor's lane. The aggrieved mare had traveled. Through the farm window, green with potted begonias, Kenny could see the doctor already at his breakfast. A young colored girl was pouring out his coffee. The doctor himself opened the door.

"Well, Mr. O'Neill," he exclaimed, "who's sick? Not Joan, I hope?"

"No," said Kenny, following the doctor back to the table. "No, nobody sick."

"Sit down," invited the doctor, "I always figure you can talk as well sitting as standing and you can rest. Won't you have some breakfast?"

"I couldn't eat," said Kenny. "Doctor," he added hoarsely, "would it—be possible—for me—to speak to you—alone?"

The doctor nodded. In a life made up of emergencies as his was, nothing astonished him.

"Annie," he said kindly, "just tell Mrs. Cole not to hurry down to breakfast. And close the door."

Kenny took the will from his pocket and spread it on the table.

The doctor wearily fumbled for his glasses and put them on.

"Hum!" he said. "The old man's will, eh? I've been wondering about it. Well, he didn't leave much but the farm, did he? And it might have been better for Don and Joan if he'd taken it with him. Nobody around here would buy it. A barn of a place! And the land's full of stone."

"Ah!" said Kenny significantly. "But Adam Craig was a miser!"

"Pooh!" said the doctor with a sniff. "Who told you that?"

Kenny stared.

"I found it out for myself," he said stiffly. "Since then I have learned that it is common rumor in the village. And the old man, even when I—I spoke of it directly to him, never troubled to deny it."

"Shucks!" said the little doctor crossly. "He liked it. It saved his pride."

"Saved—his—pride!"

The doctor nodded.

"Mr. O'Neill," he said, "country folks stare less unkindly at a miser than at some other things. It hurt Adam, knowing his guilt, to see the old Craig home going to rack and ruin. Had a lot of money when his father died. A lot. And he wanted folks to think he still had it. But he didn't. Went through it, Mr. O'Neill, hitting the high spots. Came home a penniless wreck of a man, body and soul and pocketbook warped beyond recall. I was there when they settled up his estate. As a matter of fact my brother was his lawyer. And what he hadn't lost in gambling and dissipation he lost speculating in Wall Street. Oh, he never tried the miser stunt with me. He knew that I knew that he hadn't a cent."

"Not a cent!" echoed Kenny feebly. "Not a cent!" He cleared his throat. "Not—a cent."

"Not a cent," said the doctor cheerfully. "And barely a living from that farm."

"Dr. Cole," said Kenny steadily, "he may have lost his own money. Of that I know nothing. But what about his sister's?"

"Why," said the doctor at once, "she hadn't any. Old Craig senior left it all to Adam. She ran away, you know, and went on the stage. He never forgot it. 'Tisn't much of a story. She was a darned pretty girl, high-spirited and clever, and the old man was a devil like Adam. A scandal of that kind fussed us up pretty much in those days. I remember I went to see Cordelia once in some old-time play. She was wearing those old gowns that Joan, poor child, wears now. Always had a feeling after that that I was a part of the scandal. Mother," he added dryly, "felt so too."

The doctor shook his head lugubriously.

"She was a widow when she died," reminded Kenny.

"Yes."

"The money I mean must have come from her husband and she entrusted it to Adam for Joan and Donald."

"But my dear fellow," said the doctor kindly, "he hadn't any. He was an actor chap. Cordelia came home to the farm to die while Adam was in Europe. She hadn't a cent."

"Not a cent!" said Kenny again. "Not a cent!"

"Not a cent," repeated the mystified doctor.

"Oh, my God!" said Kenny. "And I've dug up the farm!"

It was the doctor's turn to stare.

"You dug up the farm!" he said blankly.

Sick with discouragement Kenny pointed to the will.

"Read it," he said bitterly. "Particularly the 'remainder, residue and situate' part."

The doctor read and he read slowly. Before he reached the clause in question Kenny was on his feet, mopping his forehead. He told of the fairy mill and the chair by the fire.

The doctor poured himself another cup of coffee and looked at Kenny with a shade of asperity. Fairies, it would seem, were a little out of his line.

"Adam had a good many spells like that," he said, "'specially when he was drinking hard. Off like a shot, hanging out of his chair. Mere coincidence. As for the night he staggered out to the sitting room, it is possible as you suggest that he did it in a fit of drunken superstition. But there wasn't any money on his conscience. Couldn't be for there wasn't any. If he feared at all to have his sister revisit her home—queer notion, that, Mr. O'Neill! You Irish run to notions!—it was simply because he hadn't given her kids a square deal and he knew it."

Again the doctor adjusted his glasses and went back to the will.

"Doctor," flung out Kenny desperately, "I myself have seen indisputable proof in that house that Adam Craig was a miser—even the way he handled money."

The doctor sighed and looked up. And he smiled his weary, understanding smile.

"What you saw, Mr. O'Neill," he said soberly, "was something very close to poverty. He was selfish and he had to have his brandy. His economy in every other way was horrible. Horrible! As for the way he handled money, as I said before, he wanted you to think he was a miser. It seems," added the doctor dryly as he went back to his reading, "that he was a grain too successful."

"He hated his sister," blurted Kenny. "Why would he hate her and revile her memory unless he knew he had wronged her? Why did he have black wakeful hours in bed and have to drink himself to sleep?"

"Adam," said the doctor with weary sarcasm, "fancied his sister had brought disgrace upon the grand old family name of Craig. She was a good girl and clever. But Adam believed in sacrifice and conventional virtue—for women. Most men do. And he knew the way folks feel up here about the stage. The world's queer, Mr. O'Neill. And Adam was just a little queerer than the rest of it. In a sense he had wronged her. God knows he was cruel enough to those two poor youngsters. As for his passion for drinking himself to sleep—well, when a man's had straight legs and plenty of health, such a fate as Adam's hits hard.

"He hated Joan and Donald," said Kenny. "Why?"

"He resented their drain upon his pocket-book. He hadn't enough left for them and brandy too. Though the Lord knows they never cost him much. Nellie Craig had them for a while after Cordelia died. Good old soul, Nellie. But her tongue hung in the middle and worked both ways like a bell-clapper. I always blamed her for the start of the miser yarn. Adam managed to get it over on her and that was enough."

He made a final effort to read the will and while Kenny sat in stony silence, choking back a creepy feeling of despair, reached the clause pertaining to the residue of Adam's wealth.

"Ah!" he said.

"Well?" choked Kenny. "Is there some damned commonplace explanation for that, too?"

The doctor tapped the paper with his stubby finger.

"And you," he marveled, "who knew so well his devilish cunning! That clause I think was his last cruel jest."

Kenny turned white.

"A trap!" he said.

"A trap," said the doctor. "And you've swallowed bait and trap and all."

"How he must have hated me?"

"On the contrary," said the little doctor warmly, "I think in his way he was fond of you. He counted the hours until nightfall, that I know."

"And I—" said Kenny with a sharp intake of his breath, "I killed him with that story of the chair."

"Oh, nonsense, nonsense!" said the doctor kindly. "Chair or no chair he would have died just the same. I saw it coming. And your presence there this summer freed him entirely from money worries. He even paid me."

"Yes," said Kenny, "my money helped him drink himself to death."

The doctor sighed.

"Oh, well," he said, "that too would have happened just the same."

Kenny brushed his hair back dazedly from his forehead and rose. He felt as if he had fallen from a great height and hit his head. It was numbly aquiver. As he picked up the will and put it in his pocket, Adam Craig, sinister and unassailable, seemed to mock him from the grave. His last trap! Almost Kenny could hear him chuckle: "Checkmate, Kenny, checkmate! And the game is won." How well he had known his opponent's excitable fancy!

"Doctor," asked Kenny drearily, "why were all the books in the farmhouse in Adam's room?"

"There," said the doctor, "I think he meant to be kind. Cordelia had had all sorts of schooling and so had he. I think by denying the youngsters books and too much knowledge, he thought to clip their wings at the start and keep them contented. In tune with the farm, I mean, and willing to stay. He'd seen enough of ruinous discontent when his sister and himself went out in the world and tried their wings. Just a fancy. I may be wrong. Well, Mr. O'Neill, I'm sorry. There's no mystery and no money—"

"No," said Kenny dully, "no mystery and no money." He moved toward the door with a curious trance-like feeling that this was still a part of his dream.

"Just a commonplace story of self," said the doctor, following him to the door, "with two ragged little kids the victims. Myself I think it's just as well, Mr. O'Neill, to say as little as possible about things of this sort. Tales up here grow. And fire that isn't fed goes out. It's bound to. I never had the heart myself to deny the old man's miser yarn. When I do talk, I try to say as little as possible and keep my two feet solidly on the ground."

He watched Kenny down the steps and into the buggy.

"Humph!" said the little doctor. "Thought he had his fingers on a regular swap-dollinger of a mystery, didn't he? To my thinking, the only mystery in the farmhouse is himself!"

And Kenny, climbing into the buggy in hot rebellion, felt that he had come decked out gorgeously in rainbow balloons. And the doctor, practical and unromantic, had pushed a weary finger through them, one by one, watching them collapse with his bored and kindly smile of understanding. Life after all, reflected Kenny irritably, was a matter of adjectives and any man was at the mercy of his biographer. He himself could have told that story of Adam and Cordelia Craig until no man could have called it commonplace and unromantic.



CHAPTER XXVI

AN INSPIRATION

Afterward Kenny thought that Nellie must have ambled into the doctor's barnyard and turned herself, for he had no memory of guiding her. A paralyzed conviction of another anti-climax had gripped him. He remembered turning into the road with a haunting sense of eyes upon him—Adam's eyes, piercing and bright with malevolent amusement. The chart! The hints! The will! The cunning of him! What would he tell Hughie and Hannah and Hetty? What would he tell Joan? What was there to tell save that he had put two and two together and made five, a romantic five lurid with melodrama?

And the brutal practice hour in Adam's room when he had told the truth! Kenny went sick and cold and shivered. How unwittingly he had flung the old man's poverty in his teeth! How at times it must have hurt! The memory made him shrink. And it hadn't been truth. He had battled for Joan with misinterpretation and cruelty; he had practiced the truth with the telling of untruth. And the proud old man who veiled his poverty with pretense, had listened, listened inscrutably and laughed, ready to thrust from the grave itself.

Ah! Fate was forever flinging down her gauntlet.

"To Kennicott O'Neill, my friend, my signet ring." His friend! In spite of the practice hour—his friend. Kenny's eyes smarted.

"Oh, Adam, Adam!" he said, sick at heart, "I beg your pardon."

The snow crunched steadily under Nellie's feet. Kenny stared sadly at the road ahead. Could he tell Joan what now he knew: that when the few bills were paid and the estate balanced, there would be no money left for the year of study?

Perhaps Joan would marry him now—at once—to-morrow! And they could leave the farm together. After all there was silver to his cloud. Kenny brightened.

A preposterous notion of hers, that unfitness. The memory of the sunset hour in the cabin came again to darken the silver lining of his cloud. Joan's arms, Joan's voice, Joan's eyes had pleaded; it would make her happier to wait and study and watch his world before she came to it, his wife.

Kenny sighed.

It would make her—happier. And the problem still was with him.

Kenny cursed the evil in the world that had forced men to convention. If only he could help her! If only—

A car was coming up behind him with a familiar noise of rattle. It was the doctor. Kenny sat up, alert, inspired, excited.

"Doctor," he called cheerfully, "is there a long distance telephone near?"

"A mile on. Road to the right," called the doctor, inwardly amazed at his visitor's mercurial disposition. "They call it Rink's Hotel. Not much of a place. Really a road house. But you'll find a telephone."

Kenny found the telephone at Rink's Hotel in a pantry near the barroom and closed the door to insure his privacy. It seemed an interminable interval of waiting, an interval of blankness filled with voices calling numbers on to further voices, before the Club Central answered. Again he waited, tapping with impatience on the table. When the voice came he wanted, it was far away and drowsy. Kenny looked at his watch. It was not yet eight o'clock.

"Garry," he said, "is that you?"

"Yes. Who's calling?"

"It's I—Kenny."

"Kenny!" Garry's astonished voice came clearly over the wire. "Kenny, where on earth did you go?" he demanded. "And what's the matter? Is anything wrong? What are you doing up in the middle of the night?"

Kenny snorted.

"Garry," he said, "I'm mailing to you now in a very few minutes my check for four thousand dollars—"

"Say it again."

"I said—I'm mailing to you—my check—for—four thousand—dollars."

"Wait a minute, Kenny. This wire must be out of order."

Kenny swore beneath his teeth.

"I said," he repeated with withering distinctness, "that I—am—mailing—to—you—my—check—for—four—thousand—dollars. And I want you to cash it in old bills. Get, that, Garry, please. Old bills."

"Old bills!" repeated Garry in a strangled voice. "For the love of Mike! . . . Old bills!"

"Garry! For God's sake, listen! This is absolute, unadulterated common sense. I want you to get that money in old bills, the older the better. Ragged if you can. And I want you to send it to me, Craig Farm, by registered package, special delivery."

"Are you in some mess or other? Because if you are I'll bring it."

"No, I can wait. I particularly don't want you to bring it. I can't explain now. I'll write you all the details. Then I want you to get a statement from the bank. Even with the four thousand gone, my balance ought to be at least a thousand dollars. See what they make it."

"Yes."

"Next I want you to call up Ann Marvin and ask her if she's still looking for another girl to share her studio with her . . . Ann Marvin."

"Peggy's with her."

"I know that. She said she wanted a third girl. If she does, tell her I'm bringing my ward—"

"Your—what!"

"My—ward—"

"Kenny," came in cold and scandalized tones from the other end, "have you been to bed at all?"

"If you make any pretense at all of being my friend," roared Kenny in a flash of temper, "will you do me the favor of assuming that I'm serious? I'm not drunk. I'm not insane. I've slept the night through. And I'm tired and terribly in earnest."

"You did say your ward."

"I did. Mr. Craig—the uncle, you remember, an invalid—died. And he's made me the guardian of his niece—"

"The poor boob." Garry's voice was sad and sincere.

"Garry! Are you or are you not my friend?"

"I am."

"Then listen. Next I want you to ask Max Kreiling for the name and address of the French woman he knows who teaches music—"

"Just a minute, Kenny, old man. Let me say this all after you. I am to cash your check for four thousand dollars in old bills. Ragged if possible. I am to send it registered and special delivery to Craig Farm. I am to call up Ann and tell her about your—your ward. And I'm to ask Max for the name of the French woman who teaches music."

"Right. Garry, has Brian been back?"

"No. John Whitaker may have heard from him. I don't know. I haven't seen him. Oh, by the way, Kenny, Joe Curtis was in here blazing up and down my studio. Said you promised to paint his wife's portrait. What'll I tell him?"

"Tell him," said Kenny, "to go to—No, never mind. I'll be needing to work. Tell him I'll be back in New York positively by the end of next week."



CHAPTER XXVII

MISER'S GOLD

He was passionately glad in the week that followed that Fate, prodigal in her gifts to him, had made him too an actor with a genius for convincing. For he had to go on digging dots, feigning wild excitement when his heart was cold within him. He hated spades. He hated dirt. He almost hated Hughie, who went from dot to dot upon the chart with unflagging zeal and system. Kenny himself dug anywhere at any time and moodily escaped when he could to write letters. He was getting his plans in line for departure.

He had settled the problem of the doctor, after an interval of bitter struggle, with a combination of fact and fancy. He said truthfully that the doctor had rejected all notions of buried money with his usual air of weariness. He added untruthfully—and with set teeth he challenged the Angel Gabriel to settle the tormenting problem in any other way—that the doctor had conceded the probability of Adam's burying money though he had had but a few thousand dollars at best to bury.

"That," said Hughie, "is enough to dig for!" And he went on with his digging.

The need was desperate and Kenny did his best. Of the doctor's story of Adam and Cordelia Craig he told enough. And he kept on talking miser's gold when he hated the name of it. His air of excitement, said Hughie who talked endlessly of dots, dug and dreamed them, kept them all upon their toes.

At nightfall of the third day when Kenny's hatred of dots was approaching a frenzy and a ballet of spades danced with horrible rhythm through his dreams, the package came from Garry. Kenny took it with a careless whistle and went slowly up the stairs.

The closing of his bedroom door transformed him. He found matches and a lamp and marveled at the erratic pounding of his heart. It was a muffled beat of triumph. Mad laughter, tender and joyous, lurked perilously in his throat. His feet would have pirouetted in gay abandon had he not, with much responsible feeling of control, forced himself to walk with dignity and calm. But his nervous flying fingers fumbled clumsily with string and paper and taxed his patience to the utmost.

The bills were incredibly old and ragged. Kenny stared at them with a low whistle of delight, blessing Garry. Moreover, Fate and Garry had chosen to solve a problem for him by packing the bills in a strong tin box. To unpack the money and dent the tin was the work of a moment. When he had darkened the shining surface with lamp-smoke and rubbed it clean with a handkerchief which he burned, the box, discolored and dented, had an inescapable look of age, like the ragged bills.

Kenny went through the dark hallway to Adam's room with cat-like tread, the searchlight that had been a part of his road equipment in his pocket, a bag of wood-ash, purloined the day before from Hannah's kitchen, and the battered box tucked unobtrusively beneath his coat. He locked himself in and drew a long, gasping breath of intense relief.

Though wind creaks startled him again and again as he made a pedestal of faded books for his searchlight and directed its glaring circle upon the blackened wall of the fireplace, no dreaded hand upon the knob disturbed him.

He worked noiselessly and with care, removing the lower bricks with his penknife.

Brick after brick he loosened, burrowing deep in the solid wall; then with infinite care and patience he walled the money in, filled the crevices with wood-ash and hid the remaining bricks in the chimney.

He went down to supper with an unusual air of calm, but his head was aching badly. Hughie, Joan said, was nearing the last dot. He was discouraged and Hannah was cross. Kenny toyed absently with the food upon his plate.

"Mavourneen," he said, "I'm wondering."

"Wondering what, Kenny?"

"If perhaps the chart isn't purposely misleading—"

"Like Uncle's hints to you?"

"Yes."

"I hadn't thought of it."

"Every clue we have found has sent us out of doors."

"Would he, I wonder, Kenny, hide the money in the house?"

"I'm wondering too."

"The sitting room!"

"There," admitted Kenny, "he was often alone."

"Kenny, shall we look to-night?"

Kenny had his moment of doubt.

"We'll ask Hughie," he said.

And so with Hannah scoffing but noticeably on ahead with the lamp, they climbed the stairs and tore the room to pieces—to no avail. In a final burst of inspiration Hughie dragged the faded carpet from its tacks and filled the room with dust. Sneezing and coughing, they faced each other in the melee with looks of blank discouragement. Even Kenny's inexhaustible energy and excitement seemed on the point of waning. He stared drearily at the fireplace.

"It's cold in here," he said, shivering.

"Yes," said Joan, "we should have built a fire."

"The fireplace!" cried Hughie hoarsely.

"It's too late now," said Kenny irritably. "I'm chilled through."

"No, no, Mr. O'Neill, I'm not meaning the fire. It's the one place we haven't looked."

"It won't hurt none to look, Mr. O'Neill," urged Hannah, who knew that Kenny's energy was subject to undependable ebb and now. "If Hughie goes out of here with that fireplace on his mind, he'll dream all night about it."

Kenny strode to the fireplace with Hughie at his heels and jerked impatiently at the mantel. It was sturdy and unyielding.

"I feared so," he said with a shrug.

Hughie seized the lamp.

"Hold the lamp, Mr. O'Neill," he begged, crouching. "I've got to look at them bricks. Careful, sir! You're tipping it."

Huddled in the glare of the lamp they stared in fascination at the smoky bricks.

"The bricks are loose!" exclaimed Hughie. "Look here!" He rattled one with his finger.

Kenny emitted a long low whistle of intense amazement.

"Hughie, where's your knife?" he flung out wildly. "I think we're on the trail!"

"The lamp's shaking!" warned Hannah. "Let me hold it."

"Oh, my God!" gasped Hughie with the dot fever flaring in his honest eyes. "That ain't mortar. It's only ashes. Look!"

Kenny frantically pulled out a brick and dropped it with a clatter. Another and another.

"Hold the lamp closer, Hannah!" directed Hughie, reaching within. "There's something here!"

Shaking violently he pulled forth a battered box and flung back the lid. It was stuffed to the brim with ragged money.

"Glory be to God!" cried Kenny and proceeded to pull the mantel down.

But he found no more.

"And to think of him burrowin' there in the bricks," marveled Hannah, "and him that weak a child could push him over."

"Ah!" said Kenny, "but his will was strong."

He counted the money with trembling fingers and a smile, curiously pleased and tender, and declared his belief that the doctor was right. The ragged hoarding—he shivered slightly with revulsion as he touched a tattered bill—represented the rest, residue and remainder of Adam's wealth wheresoever situate. And thanks to Hughie's inspiration the executor had found it.

"Four thousand dollars!" he announced at last in a voice of disappointment.

"And a lucky thing," said Hughie with an air of pride, "that I thought of the fireplace. For it might have laid there buried for the rest of time."

"Four thousand dollars!" gasped Hannah in a reverential voice. "Four thousand dollars! Well, Mr. O'Neill, it may not be much, as you seem to think after all the dots you and Hughie have been a-diggin', but I say it's a lot. It ought to buy the child all the frocks and teachers in New York."

"It will see her through the year," said Kenny.

Joan's eyes widened.

"It would see me through a decade!" she exclaimed.

Kenny smiled.



CHAPTER XXVIII

KENNY'S WARD

Peace came mercifully to Craig farm with the finding of Adam's money.

"Toby," Joan whispered to the cat, her soft cheek pressed against his fur, "I'm going away. And I can't believe it! I can't! I can't! I can't!"

"Toby will miss you," said Hannah. "And so will I. And so will Hughie and Hetty." She cleared her throat. "As for Mr. O'Neill, Toby won't be likely to miss him at all. He's stepped too many inches off his tail. Hughie thinks it must be paralyzed. I never saw Mr. O'Neill headin' for a new dot but what I knew Toby would be sure to stick his tail in the way and start a row."

Joan's face clouded.

"Oh, Hannah, if only I knew where Donald is!"

Hannah sighed.

"I wish you did, dear."

"It seems so dreadful with Uncle gone and everything changed. And Donald doesn't even know. Think, Hannah, I may pass him in the train."

"You may," said Hannah. "And then again you mayn't."

"What if he comes home? What if he writes? It seems that I just should be here."

"If he writes, I'll send the letter. And if he comes, Hughie can ride down and telegraph you word."

"It's snowing," exclaimed Joan at the kitchen window. "Harder and harder. Oh, Hannah, if it keeps up we shan't be able to go to Briston to-morrow for my suit."

"We'll go in the sleigh. Hughie spoke of it at breakfast."

"A brown suit," mused Joan with shining eyes. "A brown hat and furs! Think, Hannah! Furs! I do hope I shall look well in them."

"Mr. O'Neill said you would and he ought to know."

Joan laughed and blushed.

At twilight the next night she came home dressed warmly in furs and a suit the color of her eyes.

"She would wear it home, Mr. O'Neill," whispered Hannah on ahead. "And all, I think, to surprise you."

Often afterward Kenny remembered her there in the half twilight of the kitchen, joyously crying out his name. There had been a glimmer of shining tin, a halo of light from the tilted stove-lids, purple at the window panes and beyond snow and the distant tinkle of sleighbells in the barn. Hetty, he remembered, had lighted the kitchen lamp and gasped. A lovely child, proud and mischievous! Her youth startled him.

In a week she was ready and eager to go but the day of farewell found her clinging to Hannah in a panic.

When at last the old Craig carriage creaked slowly away down the lane with Hannah and Hetty waving from the farm-porch, the spirit of adventure flickered forlornly out and left her sobbing.

"Good-bye, Hannah dear!" she called, her eyes wet and wistful. "Good-bye, Hetty! And—and don't forget to write me all the news! And don't let Toby catch the birds!"

Hughie, blinking and upset, stared straight ahead at Nellie's ears.

Kenny sobered. How great his trust! Hannah, waving her apron back there and wiping her eyes, trusted him. And so did Hughie and Joan and even perhaps old Adam Craig; and Mr. Abbott whose gentle grilling he had endured with merely surface patience.

"Don't cry, Joan, please!" he begged, understanding how dear familiar things are apt to loom in the pain of separation. And then with her hand to his lips, he pledged himself to make her happiness the religion of his love. It was a pledge he was destined to keep inviolate.

Ordinarily to Kenny, impatient in intervals of discomfort and delay, the trip with its rural junctions and branch roads would have been interminable torture. But to-day, with Joan's eyes, wide, dark, intent, he chose to marvel with her.

They lunched at noon between trains in a little country inn. At seven, having come after much fragmentary travel into a comforting world of express trains and Pullmans, they dined in the train itself. Joan watched the flying landscape, dotted with snow and vanishing lights, smiled with the shining wonder of it all in her eyes, and could not eat. Kenny tried scolding and found her sorry, but she could not eat.

By eleven, when the train thundered into the terminal at Thirty-third Street, New York was wrapped in a scudding whirl of white dotted dizzily with lights. Already to Kenny, buoyant, excited and inclined to stride around in purposeless circles, the lonely farm was very far away. He was back again in his own world with the roar of the city in his ears—and Joan beside him. Ah! there he knew was the reason for his gladness. Joan was beside him.

The taxi he commandeered threaded its way south through a maze of lights, hurrying crowds and noisy, weaving traffic to a tenement in Greenwich Village. Joan, searching for the unknown sparkle of that Bohemian world she had been unable to envisage, stared at the unromantic basement doors ahead and clung to Kenny's hand.

"It's quite all right, mavourneen," he assured her mischievously. "Bohemia and poverty rub shoulders down here. It's picturesque. And my club is only five blocks east. Beyond this door there's a mysterious magic tunnel that runs straight through the house to Somebody's back-yard. And in the back-yard is a castle and in the castle studios and skylights, electricity and steam heat and wide, old-fashioned fireplaces. Once it was a tenement—just like this with fifty dirty people in it—but Ann with her magic wand has changed it all."

The basement door at which he had been ringing a prolonged Morse dot and dash announcement of identity clicked back and revealed a dimly lighted tunnel. At the end a flight of steps led up into a courtyard.

Kenny closed the outer door and blocked out the roar of the city. New York receded, its hum very far away. Their heels clanked loudly in the quiet.

As they climbed the steps and came out in the courtyard, Ann's windows, trimly curtained, twinkled pleasantly through the snow ahead.

A girl stood waiting in the doorway.

"Hello, Ann!" called Kenny joyously. "Is it you?"

"Hello, Kenny!" cried a pleasant contralto voice. "Hurry up. It's snowing like fury."

Kenny seized Joan's hand and raced her across the courtyard and up the steps. When she came to a halt, shy and breathless, she was standing by a crackling wood-fire in a room that seemed all coziness and color and soft light.

A tall girl with black hair, a clear skin and intelligent eyes was smiling at them both.

"Kenny," exclaimed Ann Marvin, "you Irish will-of-the-wisp! Where have you been? Everybody's talking about you. Joan, dear, shake the snow off your coat. You're beginning to melt."

Joan's eyes opened wide at the sound of her name. Ann laughed and pinched her flushed cheek.

"My dear," she said drolly, "I know more than your name. Kenny sent me a letter of measures, spiritual, mental and physical that would turn Bertillon green with envy. If ever you default with all the foolish hearts in New York I'll turn you over to the police. And you'll never escape."

Joan clung to her with a smile and a sigh of relief that made them both laugh.

"Ann," said Kenny in heartfelt gratitude, "you're a brick. I don't wonder Frank Barrington's head over heels in love with you. You'll not be mindin', Ann, dear, if I use your telephone?"

"Sure, no!" mimicked Ann broadly. "It's yonder in the den."

Kenny at the telephone called the Players' Club and with his lips set for battle, asked for John Whitaker, whose methodical habits of diversion for once in his life he blessed. When Whitaker's voice came, brief and somewhat bored, he forgot to say: "Hello."

"Whitaker," he demanded, "where's Brian? You must know by now."

"Kenny! Is that you?"

"Yes."

"Where on earth have you been?"

"Away. Where's Brian?"

"Where's Brian?" Whitaker snorted. "He ought to be in a lunatic asylum if you want my honest opinion. As to where he is, I told you before and I'm telling you again, I'm pledged to secrecy. I've even destroyed his address so I wouldn't be tempted—and my memory couldn't be worse. I'd like to say right now, however, that he's more of an O'Neill than I thought and I'm through with him."

"Phew!" whistled Kenny, much too astonished for battle. "What—what's up, John?"

"What's up?" barked Whitaker, his voice tinged with acid. "Just this: I handed the young fool a job that ten of the best newspaper men in New York were pursuing and he turned me down cold to stay all winter in some God-forsaken quarry where he's hacking up stone—"

"Hacking up stone!"

"Feels philanthropic. Grinds stone all day and at night helps a kid he's known six months cram for a college exam. Damon and Pythias stuff and I'm the goat. Pythias is seventeen by the way and wants to work his way through college."

"Mother of men!" said Kenny softly and thought of Joan's relief.

"Sounds very beautiful and lofty in a letter," went on Whitaker, angling for sympathy, "but of all the damned, high-falutin' lunacy I've ever seen in men, that's the limit."

He waited, confident in his expectation that Kenny would agree. The voice that came back fairly bristled with virtue and approval.

"You filled his head with notions about service, didn't you, Whitaker?" demanded Kenny indignantly. "What's your idea of service anyway that now when Brian's got a chance to be of absolute service to a kid who needs him, you kick up your hind-heels and howl your head off. Sort of a boomerang, isn't it? You came up to my studio, old man, and unloaded some facts. Let me unload one right now. I'm with Brian. I think he's a brick and a jewel for sense. And you can go to thunder!"

And Kenny, with a gasping gurgle in his receiver ear, smiled sweetly into the telephone and hung up with Whitaker roaring his name. He was amazed, delighted and triumphant, uppermost in his mind the thought of Joan's peace of mind. No further need to worry over Donald.

He kissed his finger-tips to Ann who appeared in the doorway.

"Your ward," she said, "is toasting her toes by the sitting-room fire. Kenny, she's a dear!"

"As sweet," said Kenny proudly, "as an Irish smile!"



CHAPTER XXIX

THE STUDIO AGAIN

The night-watchman at the Holbein Club greeted the prodigal with a broad smile of welcome.

"Wonder, I says, to the new bell-hop, I do wonder where Mr. O'Neill's got to. Everybody's been wonderin'. Mr. Rittenhouse most of all," he added, stopping the elevator at Kenny's floor. "I heard him grumblin' just last night in the elevator to Mr. Fahr. Mr. Fahr seemed to feel that you were off with the heathen somewhere paintin' 'em all up into pictures."

Kenny found the studio in a soulless state of order and blamed it instantly upon Garry. Fifteen minutes later, gorgeous in his frayed oriental bathrobe and his Persian slippers, he banged on the wall and evoked a muffled shout of greeting. As usual Garry might or might not be in bed. Kenny's time values had not altered.

Garry came at once in bathrobe and slippers.

"Lord, Kenny," he exclaimed warmly, "I'm glad you're back and sane. But I'm mad as a wet hen!"

"At me? My dear Garry!"

"You didn't write, you know, after you said you would. You never do—"

"I telegraphed instead."

"Your telegram," reminded Garry, "said 'O.K. Kenny.' And I'm chuck full of curiosity and questions. Sit down. Every chair in the studio's on a furlough."

"So I see."

"You left the studio in something of a mess. Sid tried to straighten it out and nearly had brain fever. Got to babbling and wringing his hands and we sent for Haggerty. She went on an order bust for two days."

"The old shrew! I suppose everything in the place is under something."

He found cigarettes and a chair and settled back with an air of lazy comfort.

Garry made no attempt to disguise his impatience.

"Kenny," he said, "you're the limit. If I'd ever telephoned into your slumber and asked you to find four thousand ragged dollars and mail them to me, and if I'd said I'd accidentally acquired a ward and was bringing her back with me, you wouldn't sit there in patience and wait for facts. Mind, old dear, I want the truth. It's likely to be a lot queerer than anything you can make up."

Kenny sighed—and told the truth. Garry listened in amazement.

"Kenny," he said slowly, "you've roamed off before and gotten yourself into some extraordinary messes and I honestly thought that summer in China had taught you a lesson. But this tale of Adam Craig and the miser money is the king-pin of them all. You've absolutely got to house-clean that instinct for melodrama out of existence. It's a peril; and furthermore expensive."

"Don't rub it in," said Kenny. "Whatever you can think to say, I've already told myself. Though," he added pensively, "it's queer, Garry. Wherever I go, things begin to thicken up before I've had a chance to be at fault in any way. And I'm so darned sick of anticlimaxes."

"You keep yourself keyed up to such a pitch that anything normal's got to be an anticlimax! Think of you digging dots when you knew there wasn't any money! Think of you with a ward! Oh, my Lord!" finished Garry with a gasp. "It's incredible. It—it really is."

Kenny flushed and gnawed nervously at his lips. Could he tell Garry of Samhain?

"And think of you," said Garry, his voice changing, "salting the old man's fireplace with your own money so that his niece could come down here and study French and music! You wonderful, soft-hearted Irish lunatic! I love you for it!"

Kenny rose at once and began to bluster around the studio, damning Haggerty. There was something disturbingly warm and honest in Garry's eyes. Then with a sudden gesture of impatience he came back and his troubled glance begged for understanding.

"Garry," he blurted, "there's one thing that probably we shan't be telling people for a year at least. And that is—that I love this girl better than my life and I'm going to marry her."

He waited with a fierce hurt challenge in his eyes for irreverence and incredulity and even perhaps good-natured jeers, but Garry, sensing something big and unfamiliar, held out his hand. Kenny wrung it in passionate relief.

"What's my balance?" he demanded.

"I'm sorry I forgot that, Kenny. It's eight hundred and forty odd dollars."

"As usual," bristled Kenny, "they're lying."

Garry refused to discuss the point.

"And Brian, another Irish lunatic!" he marveled, shaking his head. "Did Max write you the name of the French woman?"

"Yes. 'Twas a Madame Morny. I've written her. Garry, darlin', where on earth did you find that inspired collection of green rags?"

"The bank managed somehow."

"Weren't they curious?"

"They were until I said the commission came from you. After that nobody asked anything."

Kenny went with him to the door, dreading the emptiness of the studio. He was a little homesick for the farm.

The order was irresistibly reminiscent of Brian, of the notebook and the struggle that had driven him forth, a penitent, upon the road. The fern was dead, like the first fever of his penance. The thought upset him. Then something drew him to the door of Brian's room and he peered in and closed it with a bang.



CHAPTER XXX

PLAYTIME

December found Joan with dark, happy eyes intent upon the rose-colored phantasmagoria of existence, her worriment past. Donald was safe with Brian. It hurt her a little that he did not write.

"I think, girleen," said Kenny, intuitional as always, "that he fears to write, thinking of course you are still at the farm and would try to tempt him back. And I haven't a doubt he's set his teeth and vowed not to come to you until he's made good." As indeed he had.

After that, save for a wistful moment now and then, she seemed content, trusting Brian.

Unhappiness lay behind her like a forgotten shadow. After the loneliness and the dreams and the hills, her playtime too had come as Donald's had come to him in Brian's world of spring; and life was whirling around her, brilliant, breathless, kaleidoscopic and altogether beautiful, a fantastic fairyland that kept her dazzled and delighted.

It had no shadows for her wondering eyes; the shadows lay behind her. New York with its shops where with Ann she had gasped and laughed and colored and stared into mirrors, its lights, its crowds, its theaters, its opera where Max Kreiling sang and left her with a sob in her heart, its amazing Bohemia of success of which Kenny was a part, seemed to her but a never-ending sparkle of romance and kindness. She spent unwearied hours in Ann's studio, masquerading in a sculptor's smock and staring at clay and marble with eyes of unbelief. And she tarried for amazed intervals in the studio upstairs where Margot Gilberte plied Cellini's art, embedding pennyweights of metal in hot pitch that, cooling, held it like a dark and shapeless hand while Margot sculptured elfin leaves and scrolls upon it. Curious things came to the jeweler's desk where Margot worked; jewels cut and uncut, soft-colored sea-pebbles, natural lumps of greenish copper, silver and gold and brass (to Margot's eye there were no baser metals) malachite and coral and New Zealand jade. Joan handled them all with gasps of reverence.

"And this, Margot? How green it is!"

"A peridot for a dewdrop in a leaf of gold. And there, Question-mark, are the pink tourmalines I propose to use for rosebuds in this necklace of silver leaves."

"And blue sapphires!"

"They are for pools of sea-water in some golden seaweed and the pearls are for buds in some cherry leaves."

"What an odd frail little tool, Margot!"

"I made it myself," said Margot. "And now, cherie, if you don't run along to Madame Morny, Kenny will scold me."

She delighted Madame Morny with her willingness to work. She delighted Kenny with her willingness to play. Nothing tired her. Together they roamed to the quaint little restaurants of Bohemia; the Italian table d'hotes where Kenny was inclined to twinkle at the youthful art students who affected pretentious ties, the quiet old German restaurant that once had been a church, Chinatown where you ate unskillfully with chopsticks upon a table of onyx, and the Turkish restaurant where everything, Sid said, was lamb.

"Garry found it," he insisted. "I didn't. I'm glad I didn't, though a lot of the Salmagundi men go over there and like it. The art students too. Forty cents. Proprietor's the real thing—he wears a fizz."

"Fuzz, darlin'," corrected Kenny gently.

"Fez!" sputtered Sid in disgust. "Fez, of course. Everything's got lamb in it, even the pastry and the coffee. I swear it has! I—I hate lamb. Didn't know the Turks went in for it so much, did you, Kenny? Jan computed a table of lamb percentages on the menu and I felt like bleating. 'Pon my word I did. Menu's got a glossary and needs it. Pilaf—that's rice. Lamb's something else. No, pilaf's lamb, and rice is something else. Oh, hanged if I know. Lamb's lamb no matter how you spell it."

"Come along with us," suggested Kenny. His kindliness of late had startled more than one, accustomed to his irresponsible caprices.

"Please do!" said Joan; and Sid, delighted, and amazed as always, repudiated at once his hatred of lamb. It was nourishing, he recalled at once with a brazen air of sincerity, and the Turks disguise it in amazingly enticing ways.

Joan laughed.

"Sid," she said, "you're a dear, blessed fibber and we want you with us."

Her poise and adaptability were startling. Her simplicity won them all. To the girls who lived in Ann's studio building she seemed all laughter and happiness and breathless eagerness to please.

"She's just herself," said Peggy Jarvis, who lived with Ann and smiled over the footlights each night in comedy that was comedy and to crowds that were crowds, "She doesn't know that half the world is posing."

Joan spent an afternoon in Peggy's dressing room during a matinee and came home with moist, excited eyes.

"Think, Peggy, think!" she exclaimed. "Once long ago that was my mother's life."

Peggy kissed her and rummaged for cigarettes. Joan's eyes rested upon her pretty face with troubled indulgence.

"Oh, Peggy," she pouted. "Why do you smoke?"

"Because," said Peggy honestly, "I like it. Does it shock you, dear?"

"It did at first," admitted Joan. "And even now I shouldn't care to smoke myself. But then when that old painter Kenny likes so came here with his wife, and her hair was so white and her face so kind, and she smoked like a chimney—"

"Joan!"

"She did," insisted Joan. "Well, then, Peggy, I just stayed awake that night and thought it all out. Peggy, do all painters' wives smoke? I mean—" she flushed and stammered.

Peggy's eyes were demure and roguish.

"You ridiculous child!" she said. "Who's the painter?"

Joan turned scarlet and bit her lip.

"And what, sweetheart," begged Peggy with ready tact, "did you think out?"

"If you smoke," said Joan, "because you really want to, Peggy, it's all right. But if a girl smokes just to—to appear startling and make men look at her, then it's all wrong!"

Peggy kissed her.

"Joan, dear," she said, "you've the most amazing intelligence in that small head that I ever met. Hum. If I'm not mistaken that's Kenny at the door. He never stops ringing until he's sure you know he's there."

Joan raced away to change her dress.

With excitement in her cheeks and eyes she was extraordinarily lovely. Kenny with difficulty kept his feet firmly upon the floor a yard away from her. Peggy laughed up at him, her piquant face impudent and understanding.

"Kenny," she said under her breath, "I suppose you know you're in love with your ward?"

Kenny had had his flare with Peggy; and he had come out of it with wounded vanity, somewhat baffled at Peggy's professed belief in the transiency of feminine love. After all, Peggy said pensively, she knew too many charming men to promise an indeterminate interval of concentration upon one. Kenny deemed such a viewpoint heretical and masculine; women were meant to be faithful.

Now he stared at the girl's saucy face with a startled flush.

"Peggy!" he said, "you little wretch!"

It was growing harder day by day to keep his love a secret.

Joan's first dance at the Holbein Club brought a train of complications.

Ann, interpretative, dressed her in snow-white tulle with here and there a glint of silver. The soft full skirt floated out above her silver slippers like a cloud, but little whiter than her throat and arms. Peggy and Ann never told the tale of her rebellion or her frantic wail:

"Oh, Peggy, Peggy! I can't go. They forgot the sleeves."

She came down the stairway like a flower, but her eyes were wistful and troubled.

"Kenny, should I?"

"Should you what, dear?"

"Dance when—when Uncle—"

"If your heart is glad and your feet want to dance, mavourneen," said Kenny gently, "then no conventional pretense of mourning shall stop them. You were kind and merciful while he lived. Even he, dear, would not ask more."

"If my Victrola arm has been winding in vain while you two practiced half the floor off the studio," put in Ann, "I shall be offended. I dreamed last night that I was an organ-grinder teaching Sid to dance."

Joan laughed and kissed her.

The Holbein Club accepted her with a hum of delight.

"She is beautiful!" said Jan.

"Beautiful, of course," said Somebody. "Any girl in Kenny's life would be beautiful or she wouldn't be there."

As for Kenny, his path was pleasant, as it always was. If a waving arm was not bidding for his attention, it was a laughing hail or a hearty hand upon his shoulder. His bright dark face sparkled with the zest of popularity.

Joan thought him as care-free as a boy.

"We dance in the club gallery," he told her, smiling at the look of wonder in her eyes.

"And the paintings and sculpture?"

"A members' exhibition. The sculptured lion staring from his pedestal at us is Jan's. Look at the superb muscle play of his flank! The midsummer woods—see, how well the lad has painted air!—is Garry's. And my pine picture's over there."

"And Sid?"

Kenny danced her the length of the gallery. A white line of sculpture gleamed on either side behind a rail of brass.

"Down here," he said. "I saved it for the last. The beggar's painted—me!"

It was Kenny in a painter's smock intent upon a palette, vividly, whimsically, delightfully Kenny. There was tenderness and sympathy in Sid's portrayal.

Joan clung to his hand in delight.

And was it all Bohemia, she asked.

Ah! admitted Kenny twinkling, there you had him. Bohemia, he fancied, was always wherever you yourself were not. The men and women who did big things were too busy for picturesque posing. Bohemia, as legend read it, had to do with rags and dreams and ambition without effort, a shabby, down-at-heel pretension that glittered without gratifying. The Bohemians of to-day were the failures of to-morrow. And the crowd who lived at the Holbein Club lived, loved, worked and died much in the fashion of less gifted folk. If there was a Bohemia of success, however, it danced here to-night.

But, girleen, the music was urging! And who could resist the sweet wild delirium of a violin's call? Certainly not an Irishman intent upon a moonbeam imprisoned in a girl's bright hair. But one sound sweeter!

"And that?" asked Joan as they glided away again among the dancers.

Kenny threw back his head and his eyes laughed.

"A robin singing in a blackthorn!"

Joan smiled at the boyish sparkle of his face. He was so charmingly, so irresponsibly young and gay.

His Bohemia of success she found a startling triumph.

"Joan's horribly disturbed," Ann telephoned in the morning. "As her guardian you'll have to settle a number of infatuated young men. The telephone's been ringing all morning. I think it's a case of 'The line forms on the right, gentlemen, on the right!'"

Kenny faced the problem with his fingers in his hair.

"Who's bothering her?" he demanded bluntly.

"The Art Students' League," said Ann demurely, "the Federation of Arts, National Society of Portrait Painters, Architectural League, Watercolor Society, Authors' League and the Prince who thinks he's a playwright."

"He's a piece of cheese!" said Kenny in intense disgust. "What did Joan think of him?"

"She said she didn't like him nearly so well as the art student who plays a banjo in the orchestra because he needs the money. Peggy knows him."

"That was wholesome," admitted Kenny. "But I don't think much of him either. He has absolutely no right when he's playing a banjo commercially to recognize the girls on the floor. I'll be over to lunch."

It was a nerve-racking hour for Ann. Kenny, pensive, ate but little. He seemed very sorry for himself and eyed Joan with melancholy tenderness. When at last the dreadful subject was broached, Ann stoutly defended everybody.

Frantic, Kenny pushed back his plate and began to stride around.

"Sit down," said Ann. "You're making everybody nervous. Of course you don't blame Joan. And of course you can't blame—"

"I'm not blaming anybody," sputtered Kenny. "That club is a hot-bed of shallow-minded, impressionable, fickle-minded boobs. I can see plainly that we'll have to be married to-day. To-morrow at the latest."

"Kenny, please!" said Joan and the conflict began.

Finding the year still strongly in her mind, he surrendered with a sigh, hurt and unhappy, remembering his vow that Joan's happiness should be the religion of his love.

"Oh, you dear foolish people!" cried Ann in despair. "Why don't you announce your engagement in the Times and discourage the line once and for all?"

"Of course!" said Kenny and looked at Joan.

"I shouldn't mind at all," said Joan, coloring.

Whereat Kenny called up the Times office, and the Holbein Club went mad with delight. Jan, without meaning to, got very drunk and shocked himself, and Margot made the ring. She did not know why Kenny wanted the golden circlet barred crosswise like a frail ladder. Nor why he insisted upon a cluster of wistaria set in amethysts.

Even then misgivings sent him to Ann in a panic of conscience.

"Am I ungenerous?" he demanded. "Perhaps Joan should have had a year of utter freedom. You know what I mean, Ann. To come and go as she pleases and with whom she pleases. She's so young." He flushed.

"Joan wouldn't have it different," said Ann, touched by the boyish wistfulness of his eyes. "She clings to you. And she's as shy and unspoiled as the day you brought her here. This flurry of admiration to her means nothing at all. She's unhappy with strangers."

Kenny knew it was true and marveled.

"I would like to be generous," he admitted with an effort. "But I can't. It's the simple truth, Ann, I can't. Even the thought of her liking other men—bothers me."

December was fated to hold for him another startling anticlimax. It came one snowy morning when he had slept even later than usual, dreaming of an iridescent balloon that climbed higher and higher with Joan peeping radiantly over the edge until at the peal of the telephone bell it disappeared entirely.

Joan's voice instantly dispelled his irritation.

"Mavourneen!" he exclaimed. "Up already! And you danced half the night."

"It's eleven o'clock," said Joan. "Besides, I couldn't sleep. I've been thinking. Remember, Kenny, when you read the will and I said that Donald should have the farm?"

"Yes," said Kenny, somewhat mystified. "I remember."

"If he's going to study and work his way through college, I don't think he'd want it, do you?"

"No, dear, I doubt if he would. What's in your mind, girleen?"

"Oh, I'm so glad you think so too! Kenny—"

"Yes?"

"Do you know Jan's cousin, the pretty girl who's a model? I know that doesn't sound at all as if it had anything to do with the farm but it has. Jan's cousin said—I hardly know how to tell you, Kenny. I don't think I like telephones. If I could see your face—"

"I'm wearing my guardian's face!"

"Oh!"

"And evidently it isn't popular."

"I like you—different. Jan's cousin said that she could get me a great deal of work if I wanted it—posing for head and shoulders—"

"Joan!"

"Oh, dear!" wailed Joan. "That was a guardian's voice. Please wait, Kenny."

"I'm waiting."

"I'm going to keep the farm and give Don the rest of the four thousand dollars. . . . Did you say anything, Kenny?"

"No. . . . No, I was just clearing my throat."

"I've only spent a little of it yet. From now on I want to earn my living like Peggy and Ann and Margot and all the others. I'll still have plenty of time to study and practice. I wonder I didn't think of it before. It was selfish when I had the farm and Don not even mentioned in the will. I suppose I didn't think of it because here things seem to happen so—so fast. I'm always in a whirl."

"Yes," said Kenny sincerely. "Things do happen fast."

She waited his approval and was the first to speak, a wondering hint of reproach in her voice.

"Kenny, please say something!"

"To be truthful, dear," said Kenny in a queer voice, "you've taken my breath away. I'm thinking—just thinking."

"It's fair—"

"Yes, dear, it's fair enough."

"You don't disapprove? Oh, I hope you won't. It will make me so happy to help Don through college."

"It will make you happy!" said Kenny and sighed.

"Ann had so many, many things to say against it. She said she was trying to see it all with your eyes—as a guardian. But I told her you're hardly ever—a guardian. And your Bohemia is democratic, isn't it? And painters are respectable and worthy men and nothing like so flighty as you read. You've said so yourself. And I like to work. And there are so many charming girls who are models and Jan's cousin is a Vassar girl—" In her eagerness to convince him she lost her breath.

"I'll come for you at Madame Morny's at four," Kenny told her, sick at heart. "And then, dear, I'll tell you exactly what I think."

And when he had rung off, he sat down weakly and laughed, his laugh unmusical and sad. The dreadful, dreadful irony of it! How could he deny her? How could he? He who had surrounded her with women friends, talented and independent, who believed in the gospel of work! He liked her generosity. He liked her willingness to work. He blessed the dear, selfless instincts of her heart, his eyes moist and tender. And yet . . . and yet! Kenny laughed again. He had hidden his own money in the fireplace to send through college a runaway youth he had never seen!

On the way home from Madame Morny's in a taxi, for the snow had become a blizzard, he made one final desperate effort to break her resolution. It was futile. Again she was passionately eager to please him. Again he found it a problem that involved her happiness and peace of mind. Again, with his heart sore, be kissed her and surrendered to her wishes with a sigh.

But he found the work for her himself with the older painters.

"Kenny, I'm so glad you asked me to bring mother's trunks with me," Joan told him. "Aranyi has asked me to pose in the gold brocade."

Something sharp stabbed at Kenny's heart.

"I meant them," he said with a sigh, "for costume dances, but Aranyi paints the texture of things with marvelous skill."

By the end of the month Joan's work day was full and he was seeing her less than he had, save at night. Garry begged her to pose for him, carried his case to Kenny and met with blank refusal.

"I'm sorry, old man," Kenny finished inexorably, "but nothing under forty need apply. You, my son, are particularly flighty and fickle. Just now you happen to be raving about Peggy, but every pretty face, I've noticed, makes you forget the one before."

And Garry, who had been trying to marry Peggy for a year and was by no means as uncertain and mercurial in his affections as Kenny would have him believe, stared with eyes intelligent and reminiscent.

"Well," he said softly, "I'll be jiggered. That's the limit!"

"Be jiggered!" Kenny told him shortly. "And have done with it."

Garry raised his eyebrows and departed. And Kenny, reverting to one of his old frantic minutes, walked the floor. He had accepted portrait commissions that would keep him busy for months; for the ragged money he had hidden in the fireplace had made his need of work imperative. Otherwise he himself could have painted Joan in the gold brocade and in all the others.

What had the money in the fireplace done for him? It had doomed him to work apart while other men painted the golden shadows in her hair.



CHAPTER XXXI

FATE STABS

March came to Kenny and found his studio with its haunting odor of coffee and cigarettes, his brushes, his head and his heart, furiously at work. He was giving himself up to love and labor with a Celtic intensity that Garry found appalling. He planned endlessly to one purpose: Joan's happiness, Joan's pleasure, Joan's future with him. The memory of the ragged money laid aside for Don he dismissed with a wry smile, gritting his teeth. What mattered in the face of the splendid fact that he was so joyously, so recklessly, so absurdly happy?

His life, with its deadly singleness of purpose, should have been simple. It attained a complexity at times at which he marveled. An inclination to blurt out the truth with panicky abruptness when he wanted to lie, plunged him into more than one predicament.

"I'm always explaining to somebody," he complained bitterly to Garry, "why I tell the truth—"

"You told Kenneth his dancing urchin was rotten—"

"It was," insisted Kenny. "Garry, why is truth always unpleasant? Why can't it be as romantic and agreeable as the things you want to say?"

"Why," countered Garry, "isn't peace as romantic as war? Ask somebody who knows. I don't."

He stared curiously at Kenny and shook his head. A heavy hand with the truth, that Irishman; and about as understandable in these splendid, tender days of his idiocy and bliss, as March wind, comets or star-dust. His passion for truth was literally a passion, relentless and exact. He worked harder. His steadiness, as Jan said, was grim and conscious and a thing of terror to anything in his path. He wrestled with his check book and managed somehow to keep his studio in order. And he was kinder. Fahr, in particular, remarked it; and Fahr, worshipping Kenny, had sputtered and endured the brunt of many tempests.

"But, Garry," he confided, round-eyed and apprehensive, "honest Injun, I don't think he ought to bottle up his temper that way. Sometimes I can almost see him swelling up and then when he speaks and I'm waiting for an Irish roar, his voice is so quiet and pleasant that I feel queer. I—I swear I do. Damn it all, I'm liking him more every day."

"So am I," said Garry honestly. "But—"

"But what?"

"I wish he'd be less turbulently happy."

"Let him," said Sid sagely, "Darn few can."

"A pendulum," reminded Garry, "swings both ways. And he's an extremist. If he'd just plant his two feet solidly on the ground and get his head out of the clouds. He's got to do it sometime."

"Oh, hell," said Sid. "Give him time. If that girl was going to marry me I'd climb up a few air-steps myself and stick my head into any old cloud."

"Good old Sid!" said Garry affectionately. "You'd be sure to hit your head on a star and then you'd be amazed and—"

"Oh, you go to thunder!" blustered Sid.

By now Kenny's Bohemia was rushing through its yearly cycle of costume dances. Motley groups emerged at times from Ann's castle and departed in taxis.

"And Gawd knows where," said Mrs. Ryan from the third floor front of the tenement that faced the street. "They're a wild bunch and my Cassie'll never travel wid 'em. Last week the architeks rigged up somethin' fierce and danced in 'the streets of Paris,' wid bullyvard cafes, they called 'em, built into the dance hall, an actress singin' the Marseillaise in a flag, and a Roosian hussy dancin' in boots. And Mr. O'Neill, God save him for a pleasant gentleman though a bit wild in the eye, took my Dinny up to be a gamin. Gay-min. I thought myself he said a 'gay mon' and Dinny's a bit young; but I found he meant him to peddle cigarettes about among the tables."

In the quaint old gowns that were delighting the older painters, Joan glided through the shifting blare and color unaware of the eyes that watched and liked her. Not so Kenny.

He knew who stared and smiled and he knew who stared too long. He was inordinately proud of her.

"Kenny, please!" begged Garry. "Let me paint her. I'm going to California in April and I won't have another chance. I won't be back until fall."

"My son—" began Kenny wearily. Then he smiled. "Oh, go ahead, Garry, darlin'. I'll not be mindin' a bit."

And Garry curiously enough caught the tantalizing charm of her sweetness that had baffled many an older and wiser man.

Shadows had no part in the wonder of Kenny's winter, but an inclination to forget his quarrel with Brian and his flare of penance, violent and incomplete—for he had never reached the longed-for grail of his son's forgiveness—troubled him vaguely. In spasmodic moments of remorse he read his notebook, tremendously buoyed up by an augmenting consciousness of evolution. Faint inner voices warned him at times not to misinterpret his exultant happiness in terms of infallibility and when they called to him he had his moments of humility and panic.

In one of them he tried to coax the fern back to life; once with an alarming air of energy and importance, he departed in a taxi and bought a great many things for Brian's room; once when miraculously the bank and he agreed for a brief period upon his balance, he succumbed to a mathematical fit of uplift and conscience, dashed off a bewildering number of checks and left the overladen slate of his credit unmarked by even an I.O.U. His brilliant air of calm and satisfaction thereafter was distinctly noticeable.

On the whole he was much too happy to be lonely or introspective. Brian's absence and his splendid, sacrificial freak of service, had been the price of Joan's content and the welfare of her brother.

Whitaker, journalism and God's green world of spring he had chosen jealously to resent. The thought of Donald West and a dim conviction of quarry hardships filled him with a new sense of solidarity in Brian and a passionate respect. The current of his affection for his son was subtly altering. It was no longer careless and frenzied and sentimental. Nor was it selfish. Something big and abiding had sprung up out of the ashes of his penance.

By the end of March, with a record-breaking period of work behind him and a furore of notoriety over his striking portrait of a famous beauty compelling him to a radiant admission of success, Kenny found himself lulled into the self-respecting quietude he craved.

Days back self-confidence had come to him in Hannah's kitchen and Adam Craig, in the course of time, had crushed it out with a keen and understanding leer. Later it had returned with Adam's death, and the weary voice of Doctor Cole had shattered it.

So now on a March night of wind and hail—and this time by telephone after much tedious trouble with the wire, Doctor Cole's voice, tired, sorrowful and kind, came stabbing intrusively into his full-blown equanimity with a message of terror.

"Mr. O'Neill—"

"Yes."

"This is Doctor Cole of Briston, Pennsylvania."

Kenny stiffened. He had never quite forgiven the doctor for that bleak, anticlimacteric morning when he had driven dazedly away with Nellie. Adjectives, like a man's laughter, were to him an irrefutable test. With one you could definitely prefigure a man's degree of refinement; with the other the aesthetic color of his soul. And gray was no color for any mortal's soul.

"Yes?"

"Mr. O'Neill," came the kind, tired voice, "I'm sorry, sorrier than I can tell. I've bad news for you. There has been an accident, a quarry explosion, and your son is badly injured."

A hot quiver swept through Kenny's body, ended at his face in a stinging rush of blood and left him icy cold.

"Brian!"

"Yes. . . . Are you there, Mr. O'Neill?"

"Yes. . . . Yes, I am here. Doctor. . . . How—badly?"

"He is—well, conscious. I can hardly say more," owned the doctor. "Thank God he's young and strong. There are no developed symptoms of fracture yet but his skull—"

"Fracture! Skull!"

"There's a chance. Contusion now merely and a swollen condition. The soft parts are unbroken and that makes an accurate diagnosis difficult, but I must warn you that there is an immediate risk to his life from shock and perhaps compression—"