"Oh, my God!" said Kenny, his eyes wet.

"You see, Mr. O'Neill," said the doctor sadly, "there may be depressed fragments of bone or effused blood. We are watching closely. But I think you had better come to him at once. There is a possibility—"

But there were some things that even the little doctor could not say.

"Still there, Mr. O'Neill?" he asked a little later.

"Yes. Where is Brian now?"

"In a quarry shack on what we call up here the Finlake mountain."

"Finlake mountain!"

"Yes, barely eighteen miles across the valley from the farm. They couldn't find a doctor. Carson is nearer but he was out. Has a widely scattered farm practice like my own and Don, frantic with terror, telephoned to me. We've done everything possible for him, Mr. O'Neill, but his pulse is pretty feeble and it's difficult to rouse him. Sensibility of course is blunted. Bound to be—"

"I will be there," said Kenny, "as soon—as soon as it is possible. There are but three north-bound trains at Briston?"

"Morning—eight-ten. Noon, one-twenty-nine and night, seven-fifteen. But don't get off at Briston, Mr. O'Neill. Finlake, fifteen miles on, is nearer—"

"I can not possibly make the morning train. The changes make the trip long. Twelve hours. . . . God!"

"I myself will meet you at Finlake. It's three miles farther to the quarry. If you are not on the noon train I will meet the night—"

"I—I cannot thank you, Doctor Cole." Kenny hung up, unaware that the doctor was adding further detail.

Almost at once he unhooked the receiver and summoned the club central. Afterward Pietro, who took his turn at the switchboard when the day operator departed, spoke of the quiet curtness of his voice.

"Pietro? Mr. O'Neill speaking. I want you, at once, to look up the earliest connecting train with Finlake, Pennsylvania, any road."

"Yes, sir," began Pietro. "What—" but the receiver had clicked into place.

Kenny stared with a shudder at the withered fern, his face as white as chalk.

A tearing hand seemed clinging to his brain.

In the face of this grief-stricken terror that quaked and burned in his soul, etching unforgettable scars, the recollection of his unsteady spurts of penance rose to mock him with their artificiality. His remorse had been but a pale, theatric spree! And now in this forgetful winter of his love, Fate had decoyed him into optimistic quietude only to thrust savagely and deep. Remorse in the raw! Was it punishment—punishment for the farcical penitent on the highway who had smiled into a woman's soft eyes, forgetting—

He answered Pietro's ring with a throbbing sense of confusion in his forehead.

The best connecting train and the earliest left the Pennsylvania Terminal at eleven. It was now but five. How could he wait?

"Pietro," he said, "give me now Doctor Barrington's office. And tell the operator to put me through to his private wire. It's urgent. I do not want the nurse in the anteroom. When you ring for me I want Dr. Barrington ready at the other end and I want you yourself, Pietro, to be sure he's there."

Pietro, obeyed, amazed and loyal.

"Frank?" Hot relief surged in Kenny's heart at the chance ease of connection. "Kenny speaking."

"Hello, Kenny. Nothing doing for me tonight, old man. I've got to sleep."

"I need you, Frank. Brian has been injured—badly—in a quarry explosion."

"Kenny!"

"A chance of skull fracture," said Kenny steadily. "That means?"

"A possible operation."

"Can you leave with me at eleven o'clock to-night, Pennsylvania Terminal? It will mean at least two days. He's at Finlake, Pennsylvania, barely conscious—in the hands of a country doctor."

The brilliant industrious young surgeon on the other end gasped and whistled. He worked and played at heavy pressure.

"Kenny, old man," he said, "nothing is impossible. Almost this is. But it's you and Brian and that's enough, I'll meet you at quarter of eleven. I'll go—thoroughly prepared. Do you feel like telling me more?"

"No."

Two receivers clicked and Kenny, remembering that he could not definitely locate Joan until six, felt the tautness of his control slip dangerously.

Eleven o'clock. . . . How could he wait? He paced the floor, his mind in its chaotic desperation, numb and inelastic. With his glance upon the psaltery stick, a dim notion of accounting filtered curiously into his mind and became obsessional. He went shaking to Brian's room and put the key of the chiffonier in his pocket. Thank God the studio was in order, save a chair or two. Brian . . . would . . . be . . . pleased. Kenny stared at the withered fern and blinked. An augury? God forbid! Then he flung the bill-file with its heterogeneous collection of receipted I.O.U.'s into his bulging suit case and called up Simon Meyer.

"Simon," he said, "whatever I happen to have there—there's a shotgun, I know, and a tennis racket and some fishing rods. . . . The rest for the moment I can't recall. . . . I want you to put all of it in a bundle and send it here at once by special messenger. I have the tickets here. . . . I'll have them ready. . . . Yes, I'll give him a check. . . . No, Simon, it won't be certified and he'll take it as it is."

He rang off and searched impatiently for pawn tickets. Simon's messenger arrived and, strained and hostile, Kenny looked over the contents of the bundle and wrote a check.

Alone in the studio again, he flung up a window, his mind pushing ahead to eleven o'clock. It seemed to him then that he could not possibly wait and go on fighting for his self-control. A gust of sleet and hail swept in with a pattering sound upon the floor. Its cold, stinging contact with his face refreshed him. Kenny's brain cleared. He gulped and gasped. Garry's car! He would not wait.

"Frank," he telephoned after an unavailing interval of search for Garry, "if you're willing we'll motor to Finlake in Garry's car. He'll not be mindin'. I borrow it often. It's a bad night of course—but we could start now. And we can make time on the road. It's barely two hundred and fifty miles but the branch roads and changes make unendurable delay. Shall I come for you in half an hour?"

Again Barrington gasped. Again he whistled. "Make it three quarters," he said, "and I think I can swing it."

"You're a jewel for sense," Kenny told him, a passionate note of gratitude in his voice. "I love you for it."

He called Ann's studio at six. Joan had not returned. Ann took the message, startled and sympathetic.

"I'll wire her in the morning," he said and, hanging up, found that Sidney Fahr had come in. He stood with his back against the door, his round face blank with terror.

"Kenny," he stammered, "I—I couldn't help hearing." The hot sympathy he could not bring himself to utter, flamed desperately in his face—almost to the ruin of Kenny's iron control. "I—I—I can do something, can't I, Kenny?"

"Yes, Sid, darlin', you can," said Kenny gently. "I'm taking Garry's car. You can square me with him."

"I—I'd even thrash him," mumbled Sid.

"Then if you will I'd like you to get in touch with Westcott's wife and tell her. I'm painting her portrait. She comes to-morrow at ten. Sid, could you—could you clean off those two chairs?"

Sid fell upon the nearest chair with fearful energy. At the table Kenny hurriedly wrote a check.

"And to-morrow I want you to deposit this to Brian's account. I'm paying back—what I owe him." His mouth worked.

"Oh, Sid!" he said, his face scarlet.

"Now, now, now, Kenny," choked the little painter, winking and making horrible faces at the littered chair, "don't you go to taking on. Don't you do it. I'll call up Westcott. The old gladiator!" Somehow he turned his sniffle to a snort. "What in thunder does she want to be painted for anyway? She's got a nose like a triangle and the composition of her face is all wrong."

He blinked away the wetness on his lashes and wondered why, with every other chair in the studio clear, Kenny should make a point of the littered two. But he did not ask. Instead he entered upon a period of fruitless and agitated trotting that lasted until Kenny came hack from the garage with Garry's car. Then Sid packed him in, made one last terrible face and bolted across the sidewalk for the door.

Beyond the threshold he bolted for a telephone.

"Jan," he said in shocked tones, "I want you to come down to the bar and watch me. I—I've made up my mind to get drunk. I've got to." He gulped. "I'll tell you why when you come down."

"Oh, fiddlesticks!" said Jan in a bored voice. "Go down to the grill and eat something. And order me an English mutton chop and some macaroni. I'll be down to dinner in five minutes."

Sid aggrievedly obeyed.



CHAPTER XXXII

ON FINLAKE MOUNTAIN

Frank Barrington was to tell wryly in the grillroom of that night-ride in the sleety wind through a polar world of ghostly, ice-hung trees. Every flying rod of the sleazy road he knew was a peril. Even the chains failed at times to grip. For eight hours the whir of the motor and the tearing sound of the wind blared in his ears. For eight hours he marveled at the silence and efficiency of the muffled driver beside him who had apparently said all he intended to say upon the ferry. He drove even faster than Frank had anticipated; and he drove with more care, as if, defiantly, he feared the traps of an evil destiny to keep him from his goal. At times he turned the swiveled searchlight upon a road-sign and evoked a glistening play of silver on the trees. Once, cursing, he changed a tire; once the car skidded dangerously in a circle but to Frank his air of confidence was hypnotically convincing. The final stretch of the journey became a dim and frosty blur of sleety trees.

At Finlake they began to climb. It was after three when the headlights blazed upon the quarry.

"I wired the doctor to wait," said Kenny. "He knows you're with me."

"We leave the car here?"

"We'll have to." He turned his searchlight on the cliff ahead. "There's a path yonder."

"And which shack, I wonder?"

"There's a light in only one."

Frank worked his stiffened face to relieve the feeling of cold contorted rubber and followed Kenny up the path. Light glimmered dimly through the jungle of frost upon the shack window. Fronded whitely by the sleet, the panes loomed out of the dark like an incandescent series of camera plates, bizarre and oriental. Frank shivered in the wind.

Doctor Cole opened the door. Beyond in the rude room of the shack a lamp flared smokily.

"Brian?" said Kenny, his color gone.

"Why," said Doctor Cole, "his pulse is a lot stronger, Mr. O'Neill, and he complains now of pain—"

"That means?"

"It means, Kenny," said Frank Barrington, "that he has passed on normally to the stage of reaction." But his keen, intelligent eyes sought Doctor Cole with a furtive lifting of his brows and asked a question.

"Not a sign," said the little doctor gladly. "If anything he's a shade too wide awake. And irritable. I've been setting his leg—"

Kenny wheeled fiercely.

"His leg!" he said. "His leg!"

"I'm sorry," stammered the doctor. "I—I quite forgot you didn't know. . . . Broken between the knee and the hip," he added, turning to Barrington. "I thought it merely paresis of the muscles until—"

"Where is he?" put in Kenny sharply. "What room?"

"There are only two rooms here," said Doctor Cole. "The stairway's yonder."

"Just a minute, Kenny." Frank checked him with a gesture. "I'm going up first with Doctor Cole."

Kenny groaned.

"Sit down," said Frank kindly. "Where's some brandy? Thank you, Doctor. Now, Kenny, listen, please. The first risk to Brian's life is past. I mean death from shock. He's not drowsy and he's feeling pain. His leg, in the face of other possibilities, is merely painful. But I must look at his head—"

"Frank, darlin'," said Kenny patiently, "I brought you up here to order us all around. Go to it."

He flung himself into a chair by the stove and drowsing after a while in a reactive sweep of exhaustion, awakened with a terrified jerk. A boy was banking the red-hot stove, his white face like and yet unlike—Joan's.

"Mr. O'Neill," he blurted with a boyish sob, "I—I did it. I was driving the mule-cart up the path. Grogan told me not to but I—I coaxed Tony. And when some earth crumbled ahead I jerked back—too quickly—and scared the mule. I've got to tell somebody. I've got to. . . . And nobody listens—"

"Tell me the rest," said Kenny wanly. "I've been wonderin'."

"You see, Mr. O'Neill," he gulped, his eyes dark with grief and horror, "the mule went back upon his haunches and drove the cart against a boulder. It came out and crashed over the ledge and through the roof of the dynamite shack—"

"God!" In that vivid moment of his picturing, Kenny wondered why he should think of bouillon cups crashing loudly on a roof.

"And the other men were only scratched. A while ago—when Brian sent for me—he thought of it through all his pain—"

"He would," said Kenny.

"I—I wanted to kill myself."

"Oh, nonsense," said Kenny kindly.

Don flung his arm across his eyes and sobbed aloud.

"Oh," he choked, "if someone would only swear at me!"

"I—I'd like to," said Kenny wryly, "for your sake and for my own, but I'm all—in."

He stared dully at the fire until the stair creaked and Frank came in with Doctor Cole.

"There isn't yet," Frank told him, "a single pressure symptom that I consider alarming and Doctor Cole has done wonders with his leg. But any emotional excitement is a danger. Three minutes, old man." He followed Kenny up the stairway, watch in hand.

The raftered room was dim and quiet. Kenny sickened at the faint odor of antiseptics and softly closed the door.

Brian opened his eyes.

"Kenny, old dear," he said softly, "all these doctors are boobs. Frank in particular is an awful ass. I told him so. He's loaded with fool questions. One look at the Irish face of you is worth them all."

Kenny, staring at the pallid face upon the pillow, blinked and smiled.

"Frank told me you drove up here through the sleet," marveled Brian, clinging to his hand. "A god-forsaken spot! I'm sorry—"

"Three minutes!" warned Frank Barrington at the door. He knew Kenny much too well to trust him further.

And Kenny made a wry face and departed—with torture in his throat. His voice had failed him utterly.

A sleety dawn was graying at the windows.

"Bed!" commanded Barrington briefly.

"Doctor Cole has found another shack. He's waiting for you."

"And you?"

"I'll sleep to-morrow."



CHAPTER XXXIII

IN THE SPAN OF A DAY

Kenny slept heavily until three that afternoon. Don wakened him.

"My sister is here," he said.

"Joan!"

Don stared a little at his quick, astonished warmth.

"She wired Doctor Cole," he said, "and went to the farm. He brought her back with him at noon."

"The heart of her! I might have known. And Brian?"

Brian, it seemed, was wakeful and nervous, his pain intense. The pressure symptoms had not advanced.

"Head's better," Don finished. "They've watched him like a hawk. But they're letting up a bit now—"

"And Dr. Barrington?"

"Asleep downstairs."

"Here?"

"Yes. We found another cot. The car's in Grogan's shed."

From the quarry below came the rumble of a blast.

"Would you think—" he demanded, but the futility of his protest made him dumb.

"The world keeps on going," said Kenny. He dressed hurriedly.

"Women," commented Don gloomily, following him down the stairs, "are queer. My sister wept all over me. As if I hadn't had enough shocks—"

He caught his breath and stumbled. In the room below Barrington stirred.

"Quiet, Don!" warned Kenny, sensing the tears of heartbreak that quivered on his lashes. He read the boy's hot heart with a renewed shock of understanding; they were namelessly akin.

Cold sunlight lay upon the cluster of shacks. The wind that bore the rumble of the quarry upward was sharp and gusty and laden with stinging particles of grit. A group of Italian women, chattering and gesticulating in, apparently, unheeded unison, lingered near the shack where Brian lay, agonizingly conscious of nerve and body, irritably weary of the inevitable doctor at his bedside. Kenny charged them with a look of indignation and shooed them to retreat in maledictory Italian.

Inside Joan was busy at the stove.

Kenny caught her hands, protesting, praising, thanking in a breath, and Don, regarding them with a look of frank and bitter comprehension, moved off toward the window with all a boy's disgust. In the span of a day he had learned and suffered over-much. Grogan's world of drills and noise down there was heartless and insistent. . . . It went on and on, puffing, drilling, sorting rattling stone. Up here in the shack was the lunacy of heart-things apart from him. The thought filled him with jealous anger. And upstairs— He wheeled and glared, fighting down the agony in his throat. Kenny was moving toward the stairway.

"Mr. O'Neill," barked Don, "Dr. Barrington particularly said you—you were not to go up there. He said that Brian's got to have the—the quiet kind around—"

Joan's quick stare of reproach brought the color to his face.

"I—I beg your pardon, Mr. O'Neill," he blurted. "He said—he said he must have quiet."

"It's all right," said Kenny ruefully. "Quite all right. You've been up?" he added quietly.

Don dug his toe into the floor and a hot flush suffused his forehead.

"To tell you the truth," he said with some annoyance, "Doctor Barrington wouldn't let me in. He seems to be able to manage a good many things at once."

"Ah!" said Kenny.

"We must find still another cot," said Joan, pouring coffee at the stove.

So in the dark hours of nervous unrestraint that marked for Don and Kenny that lagging period of terror and suspense, Joan stepped to the helm and steered. And there was need of steering.

Chaos would have reigned without it.



CHAPTER XXXIV

A FACE

Vagueness lay for Brian in that shack room where the noise of forest trees mourned always at the window. Only pain was sharp . . . colossal, rearing misshapen out of the blur induced by an awful weakness. Sleep wrenched him for horrible dreaming minutes from his world of pain. Pain wrenched him back. At times a mammoth terror lay in his soul, undefined yet grotesquely positive, as if, pushing back, his consciousness foresaw that horrific catastrophe of noise and belching terror, and waited, unable to sense any of its details save the single one of personal tragedy and pain. There were cramped minutes when the rafters of the peaked roof seemed pressing down upon him . . . and minutes of a diffused reaching out when the world, torn by internal explosion, seemed flying away from him in fragments, even walls receding from his cot which stayed, by a miracle, alone upon a wind-swept moor.

Intervals were an eternity. Familiarity with the detail of the room engendered frantic loathing. His brain conned over the faded colors in the rag rug and encountered the unchangeable, bayonet-like crack in the mirror with nervous fury. No peace came with the darkness. Each familiar thing persisted, looming clearer to his tired mind by the very effort his straining eyes made to reach it. There was the table clogged with doctors' litter . . . and there the other cot where Frank pretended to sleep and kept his vigil . . . there the chair . . . and there the dab of yellow in the rug that the sun struck into faded gayety in the morning . . . and there the crack across the mirror, the wriggling, distorted, foolish crack that seemed alive for all its sameness. And there was always the noise of wind which became a corollary of his pain, pulsing with it, never quiet, an overtone that tragically would not yield.

Into the blur of wind and weakness and pain came two miracles—a red geranium peering out of the dusk of the room like a glowing coal, unfamiliar and therefore a delight—a bit of velvet laughter in the drab that caught his whole attention . . . the other a face. The face came first in a cloud of flower-spotted purple that he knew clearly was in some way related to the hypodermic needle Frank had plunged into his arm while the sunset still lay painted on the window. . . . It took form in the purple like a pansy—that face—grew sweet and vivid and very real. Mercifully its loveliness was changeable, losing its pansy purples and gaining glints of gold . . . becoming less a pansy . . . more a face flower-like with compassion.

"And now?" wondered Brian when the face came again.

"It is morning," said Joan.

At the sound of her voice there came within him an extraordinary fusing, at once a pain and a delight . . . fragments of memory . . . a moonbeam . . . tears . . . the crackle of a fire . . . a quarry mist . . . the glory of stars . . . a meaning . . . a motive that startled and defied him.

"There should be moonlight on your hair," said Brian, drifting slowly back to a knowledge of reality and pain.

"Moonlight?"

"You are Joan."

"Yes. At least until Doctor Cole finds someone else, I am at times your nurse. The pain, Brian?" She bent over him, straightening a pillow, touching his forehead with cool, questioning fingers.

"Not worse," said Brian.

"I am glad."

"There was a purple cloud," he said, frowning.

"The drug. Doctor Barrington wanted you to sleep."

"And the geranium?" His eyes sought it with relief.

"Kenny found it. Grogan's wife had it in her window. I think he must have bullied her a little—"

"Bless him! . . . Where's the mirror?"

"Downstairs. I'm sleeping there."

"Thank God!" He closed his eyes, his color ebbing. "This plaster cast," he apologized, "is like a suit of armor. It bothers me."

"Poor fellow! . . . Can you eat?"

"Not—yet. . . . Who's cooking?"

"Sometimes Don; sometimes I—unless the doctor sends me here. Once—Kenny."

Brian smiled.

"You are very good," he said simply.



CHAPTER XXXV

THE PENITENT

Brian's skull was young and elastic. It saved him much, but Barrington lingered until the period of suspense was at an end. Kenny drove him to the Finlake station.

"This car has been a godsend," he said.

"And Garry's wired me to keep it. He's going to the coast."

"When?"

"Thursday."

Kenny's eyes were moist and grateful.

"Ah, Frank, darlin', you're a jewel!"

"Piffle!" countered Frank. "Kenny, old dear, I think you hit a chicken. If at any time," he added at the station, "you feel the need of me, I want you to wire. He's bound to be nervous. And if his convalescence seems slow and irksome, remember that the reaction of a shock like that isn't merely physical."

Kenny wrung his hand in silence. He motored home, oppressed by the bare line of hills and the noise of the quarry.

As usual the sight of Joan dispelled his gloom. Brian's pain was less. He had fallen asleep of his own accord.

"He asked for you," she added.

"You told him Frank wouldn't let me in?"

"Yes."

"Hum. . . . Where's Don?"

"I sent him to the store."

Kenny darted away with an air of expectancy to the other shack, whence, after an excited period of foraging, he emerged, carrying a bundle. Frank, knowing him well enough to read his shining enthusiasm aright, would have turned him back at Brian's door without a qualm. But Frank was not at hand.

"You look like a kid sneaking home with a stray cat!" Brian told him with a grin.

"What's in the bundle?"

"I've tried so many times to get in," admitted Kenny, "with Frank nippin' me just as my hand was on the knob, that I'm feelin' a bit surreptitious." He held up a tennis racket and a shotgun.

"And everything else," he boasted with an air of triumph, "that I took to Simon."

"And the bill-file!" exclaimed Brian, staring at the litter on the floor. "Jemima!"

"You remember it, Brian? You hated the sight of it. 'Tis the stiletto I stuck in a chunk of wax—"

"Lord, yes! And you wrote the I.O.U.'s on anything from a playing card to the end of a shirt."

"And never paid 'em until I had to," said Kenny with an unyielding air of self-contempt. "Many the time you checked 'em off, Brian, and rebuked me as you should. But that, by the Blessed Bell of Clare, is all behind me."

He proudly exhibited the bizarre collection of scraps, initialed in token of debt and reinitialed in token of payment.

"Brian—I—I—"

"Go ahead, old boy," said Brian, his eyes tender. "I can see you've got a lot on your mind."

"I paid 'em—every one!"

"So I see."

"And never again will you have to bookkeep lies. I'm that truthful now Sid worries a bit!"

Brian's amazed eyes twinkled.

"You delicious lunatic!" he said.

"I practiced," went on Kenny with his lips compressed. "I practiced hard—up at the farm with Adam."

"Joan's told me you were there. I can't quite hitch things together yet, but I will in time."

"A landslide of things seemed to happen the minute you went—"

"I always had a feeling," admitted Brian, "that if I didn't stick around and keep an eye on you, a lot of things would happen."

"They did. They've been happenin' ever since."

Brian flushed and put out his hand.

"Kenny, surely you guessed. I was sorry—"

"Jewel machree, I was fair sick about the shotgun. And after you went I was willing to be sorry about anything—to get you back."

"And Ann's statuette. Lord, I burn when I think of it."

"You couldn't be blamed for a bit of temper. You're Irish, lad, and an O'Neill. 'Tis a splendid inheritance but volcanic too." He changed color and began to roam around the room, his mind casting up a painful memory.

"You'll never guess," he went on moodily, "what fell upon the head of me after you went. John Whitaker came up and took a shot at me. And Garry. And then after a while when I was quieter, old Adam, stirring me up afresh. My ears are as used to the truth as my tongue."

"It's a darned shame!" said Brian warmly. Kenny sighed.

"Ah, Brian," he said wistfully, "I was needin' it all. You can't conceive until you put your mind to it or—or write it down, what a failure I've been—"

"Failure!"

"As a parent. Even my penance on the road was—was like the rest."

"Your penance!"

"I bought a corncrib and a mule," flung out Kenny, roaming turbulently around the room, "and thrashed a farmer. And I hated the rain and the smell of cheese and burned up the corn-crib—"

"Kenny, what are you talking about?"

Inexorably intent upon the easing of his conscience Kenny told the tale of his penance with terrifying honesty and truth.

Brian listened and dared not smile.

"At first I—I hoped to find a clue," finished Kenny, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "And then after I—I saw Joan I hoped I wouldn't. You're not blamin' me, Brian?"

"Not a bit. I'd have lingered myself."

"The heart of you!" said Kenny, biting his lips. "I don't deserve it. Lad, dear, the sunsets are past. I'm understandin'. And if you want Whitaker's job, I—I'm willing. If you'd rather come back to the studio and free-lance, I—I want you to know—" he gulped—"that things are different. There's order there and the—the chairs are cleared. Never a chair but what you can sit down on without staring behind you. You wished that, Brian—"

Brian turned his head.

"Yes," he said. There were tears and laughter in his voice.

"The money and clothes I borrowed," went on Kenny fervidly, "are paid back. The clothes are safe in a new chiffonier and here's the key. I sealed it in an envelope and well I did. I was badly needin' some things you had and Pietro went out and bought them for me. As for my temper, it's a lot better. A lot! Sid marvels at it. I—I do myself. It all comes from the hell up there on the ridge with Adam." He drew a long breath. "I've a record of work that will fill you with pride. And though I seem to have a lot of money, I haven't bought a foolish thing since the corncrib. There's plebeian regularity enough in my money affairs now, Brian, to please even you! Though I'm havin' a bit of a struggle with my check book. You can see for yourself, can't you, Brian, 'twould not be the disorderly Bohemia you seem to hate? 'Twould not be hand-to-mouth. Mind, I'm not seekin' to persuade you. So help me God, I—I want you to do just what you want to do yourself—"

"Kenny," said Brian dangerously, "if you go on one second more, you'll have me sniffling—"

Horrified and guilty, Kenny bolted for the door, his hand clenched in his hair.

"One thing more, Brian," he said, wheeling, "I—I've got to say it. I've anchored that damned stick to the psaltery with a shoestring. We—we couldn't lose it!"

And closing the door, Kenny again wiped his forehead, remembering sadly that he had planned to wind his son around his finger and induce him to return. It had been the trend of all his preparation and resolve. And now—what? He had choked back his inclination and begged Brian, with impassioned sincerity, to do precisely what would please him most.

He wondered why the anticlimax brought him—peace.

When Doctor Cole arrived an hour later he found the shack in turmoil. The truant hour of laughter and excitement, Kenny told him in a panic of remorse, had sharpened Brian's pain. His pulse was galloping. With a sigh the little doctor drugged his tossing patient into troubled sleep.

Again through a cloud of flower-spotted purple shot now with gleams of light as from a camp fire, Brian drifted unquietly, conscious of odd and unrelated things, stars that turned to eyes, a moonbeam that broke upon a pine-bough and fell in a shower of moon-silvered tears; in the tears a face that turned perversely to a pansy. Then something snapped and crackled sharply and he sat beside a camp fire, conscious of an indefinable fusing within him. Beyond in a curling milk-white mist lay the pansy, half a flower—half a face. It floated toward him, sometimes part of the smoke from his fire, sometimes but a flower-shadow in the cloud of purple. Brian strained to see it clearly and could not until the inner fusing came again and Joan stood by the fire, the sheen of moonlight on her hair.

"You did so much for him," she said, "and now—the boulder!"

Brian furrowed his forehead in painful concentration.

"I thought I did it all for Don," he said. "For months I've thought so but since something fused here in my heart, something linked to tears and stars and moonlight and the crackle of a fire, I know I did it all for you."

"For me, Brian!"

"For you!"

In the cloud of purple Joan's eyes grew round and unbelieving.

"Your face, all tears and sorrow and sweetness," said Brian stubbornly, "etched itself on my memory the night Don ran away."

"I—I did not know you saw me."

"I know now that all I did that night I did for you. Don swore at you—remember?"

The flower-like face in the purple cloud saddened. Brian distinctly heard the crackle of the camp fire.

"I thrashed him for it!"

"You said in your letter—"

"I said I would help him, yes, but I wrote and I made Don write because I could not bear to have you hurt and worried. And even at the quarry, when I was keen to be off to Whitaker, I saw your face in the mist, urging me to stay—to stay and help Don. And I did—for you. I know that all these things I did for you. I know!"

But again he was staring at a pansy and the cloud of purple floated hazily away. Tired, ill and aeons old, Brian opened his eyes.

"I'm glad you're awake," said Joan gently. "You were dreaming. Drugs frighten me."

"Nothing was clear," said Brian, touching his forehead, "but the pansy and you. And purple—like that." He pointed to her ring. "What an odd ring it is, Joan! Wistaria?"

Joan nodded, her color bright.

"Wistaria on a ladder. It's the ring Kenny gave me."

Brian's startled eyes met and held her own. "Why?" he asked.

"I'm going to marry him. Didn't you know?"

"No," said Brian. "I—I didn't know."



CHAPTER XXXVI

APRIL

April with its tender flame of green brought lagging days of worry. Brian, said Kenny wistfully, was just—not Brian. He was an irritable convalescent in a plaster cast, too nervous to be patient. His pain had been intense, the shock disastrous to his self-control. The haggard mark of it upon his face Don read with scalding heart and brooded. When after a refractory week of undisciplined nerves and temper that strained the doctor's endurance to the breaking point, Brian went out of his head for forty-eight hours and babbled like a madman about a face in the mist, Kenny in terror wired for Frank Barrington. Brian, he thought, must be frantic with pain.

Frank came, mystified and apprehensive. He found a white and apathetic patient who, with his delirium gone, denied abnormal pain.

"It isn't pain," Frank reported. "Of that I'm convinced. His head's in excellent condition and his danger of lameness is at an end. Though he resented the suggestion, I think there's something on his mind. And whatever it is, he's much too shattered nervously to give it a normal valuation."

"Keep that kid out of his room," advised Kenny hotly. "I can't. He moons around up there like a ghost. Brian admits that he's so sorry for him at times that it makes him feel sick."

"Hum!" said Frank and went in search of Don.

"I suppose you think I'm too much of a kid to have an opinion," Don told him, his face white and fierce, "but I—I did it. And I watch him more than anybody else—" He choked and blinked back boyish tears of indignation.

"Keep Mr. O'Neill out of Brian's room," he snorted. "He'd excite anybody!"

"I intend to keep you all out," was Frank's verdict in the end. "All but the nurse and Joan. Joan's not temperamental and she has nothing on her conscience. She has moreover a sedative convincing type of cheer that's a mighty good influence. The rest of you are simply on a sentimental spree of penance. You, Kenny, are so anxious to square yourself that you make him nervous and he fumes and blames himself. And Don can't look at him without remorse in his eyes. You're both too flighty and penitential for Brian's good."

Frank departed and Joan compassionately set herself to sentinel the sickroom. There were trying hours when her voice alone had power to soothe the querulous young savage whose tired eyes begged them all to forgive him.

Nurses came and nurses hopelessly departed. Brian hated and hounded them all with savage and impartial persistence. He was jarring even the little doctor out of his normal weary calm.

"I've seen him flat on the back of him before," Kenny confided to Joan in some distress, "a lamb for sense! But now he's tiring you out."

"You mustn't blame him," urged Joan. "He never asks me to come. I go always of my own accord and oftener now since Frank scolded. He's lonely without you and Donald and he hates the nurse—"

"He hates 'em all," said Kenny.

"No matter how nervous he is, I can read him to sleep."

"Ah, colleen!" There was a flash of reverence in Kenny's eyes. It mutely thanked her.

"I can't forget what he did for Don. Nor can I forget that Don's impulse—"

"Don remembers too."

Joan sighed.

"He worries me, Kenny—Don, I mean. Sometimes I think he sees in my help the one atonement he can make: he fumes and reproaches so when Brian is nervous or lonely. He even dreams of the boulder."

"And the year of study, mavourneen?"

Joan's face clouded.

"Don needs me," she said. "He would be frantic here alone. I cannot desert him."

"Nor I," said Kenny. "But the year of waiting ends at Samhain."

"Yes," said Joan, coloring. "I have given Don the money," she added. "If now he would only study!"

"He shall!" said Kenny and set himself to the finishing of Brian's winter task. That sacrifice, at least, he decided, nagging Don into hours of study that were a godsend to them both, should not become an anticlimax. He had paid once—in ragged money. For Joan's sake he would pay willingly again in time. Brian and Joan and Don—and he himself, with indolence for once in his life unwelcome, would be happier for the effort. But there were moments of clash and irritation when Don's energy flagged and he flung his books aside in black disgust.

"No use," he said moodily. "I can't work. I've got too much on my mind."

Kenny merely looked at him.

Don flushed.

"Mr. O'Neill," he barked.

"Shut up!" thundered Kenny, "I don't propose to quarrel now or at any other time."

They glared at each other in nervous indignation.

"Brian," Kenny added with a sniff, "was sure you could swing it. I never was. You need balance and a sense of responsibility."

Don gritted his teeth and worked in an inexhaustible spurt of endurance.

"Stop wandering around the room and kicking things," Kenny commanded more than once with his own hand clenched in his hair. "If you don't remember, you don't remember, and that's an end of it. Here's the book. Look it over while I'm smoking."

Once when the clash had a suspicious ring of familiarity, he grinned.

"What's the matter?" demanded Don huffily. "What are you laughing at? Me?"

"No," said Kenny. "I was just thinking of a man I know. Name's Whitaker."

Thus May came with a warm wind of spice and fresh misgivings furrowed the doctor's brow.

"Now that the windows are opened so much," he fretted, "the rumble of that quarry is inferno. The blasts bother him?"

"He jumps," said Joan.

"I thought so. He must have peace and quiet. If Mr. O'Neill is willing, we'll move him to the farm."

By the time the orchard flung out its white prayer of blossoms to the sun, the doctor had his patient at the farm.

And summer dreamed again upon the hills.



CHAPTER XXXVII

HONEYSUCKLE DAYS

Pine-sweet wind still blew around the cabin, the sylvan river laughed in the sun, wistaria hung grape-like on the ladder of vine; but over it all, to Kenny, brooded the pathos of change.

He longed wistfully for the gay vitality of that other summer when every day had been an exquisite intaglio of laughter. There were times when unreasonably he even missed Adam. How the nights in contrast had sharpened the joy of his days! And he hated the village boy who ferried the punt back and forth upon the river, hated the horn with its transforming miracles of reminiscence, for it pointed the nameless lack of sparkle now that struck melancholy into his soul. He had lived in Arcady and jealously he would have hoarded each detail of its charm.

The days were long and quiet. Life for all of them centered around the wheel-chair on the porch. There Joan read aloud while the nurse kept wisely in the background, and Hannah at meal-times set the table on the porch.

In the long afternoons of study that Kenny spent with Don, Brian asserted his independence and banished books. He seemed content to talk. Joan listened eagerly to his tales of the road, never tiring of Don's vagabond adventures. After the worried months of monotony and pain, the afternoons of reminiscence were tonic for them both. Lazy humor crept back to Brian's eyes. At times he whistled. Wind and sun were tanning his skin to the hue of health.

He had his dark hours. Every effort then to cheer him left him tired and quiet. Talk of the chain of circumstances that had, oddly, brought them all together, he avoided with a frown. Any reference to her life in New York, Joan found, plunged him into gloom. Was it, she wondered, because he knew his accident had brought her year of play and study to an end? She longed passionately to tell him how easy it had been for her—how trifling, as a sacrifice, in the face of his kindness to Don; but shyness held her back.

"Honeysuckle days!" Brian called his days of convalescence, for the vine upon the porch hung full.

"Is it so hot in the pines?" he wondered one sultry afternoon.

"No," said Joan. "There it's always dark and cool and quiet. When you can walk, Brian, you must see the cabin."

Heat quivered visibly in the valley. A faint breeze frolicked now and then upon the ridge, fluttering the honeysuckle and the pages of an open book upon the table.

"I'm glad it isn't," said Brian in relief. "Somehow I can't imagine Kenny off there in a hot cabin striding up and down and grilling Don. He's so—so combustible. As a matter of fact," he added, "I can't imagine him in any sort of cabin grilling Don. Soft-hearted lunatic!"

"Don gets awfully on his nerves," said Joan, shaking her head. "If it wasn't that he's doing it for you—"

"For me, Joan!"

Joan nodded.

"What you began, he'll finish for you. He said so. It bothered him that all those dreary months you spent at the quarry just to help Don might be in vain. Don went so dreadfully to pieces."

"Sentimental old hothead," grumbled Brian, touched and pleased. "I love him for it."

"I wonder if you realize how much he cares!"

"For—you?" asked Brian quietly. "Yes."

"No, no," said Joan, coloring. "For you. For you he has worked through splendidly to—to less of self. And so has Don. It's a wonderful tribute, Brian. To inspire something fine and beautiful is fine and beautiful itself."

Brian stared uncomfortably at a red barn in the valley.

"To have something dormant inside that catches fire and burns up splendidly into unselfishness is better," he said. "This porch is like a throne. One sits up here among the honeysuckles and finds a world of summer at his feet."

"Last summer," remembered Joan, "Kenny used to tell me over and over again that you were all things in one. All, Brian. Think of it! Almost," she finished demurely, "I came to believe it."

Brian glanced at her in droll suspicion. Her eyes laughed at him with the wholesome mischief of a child.

"Almost!" he countered. "I insist upon my full meed of perfection. When did I lose it?"

"When you hounded the nurse—"

"Plural noun," amended Brian wryly.

"Plural," agreed Joan. "I knew then that the idol had clay feet."

Brian groaned.

"Haven't you?"

"Yes," he said. "And a clay head. But I was never an idol."

"Oh, yes you were!" said Joan. "When you gave up your trip abroad to help Don, you became to me a wonderful sort of—of selfless young god—"

"Joan!" He stared at her in panic.

"Truly. And I'd rather have you human. I always thought of you with thankful worship—"

"I approve the attitude," said Brian mischievously. "Please state when and why discontinued."

"The minute I met you."

"Phew! That I consider unnecessarily heartless candor. Did you ever hear of tempering the wind to the shorn lamb?"

"If I had met you in the end, alive and well," said Joan thoughtfully, "I would have kept you up there on your pedestal out of mortal reach but you came into my life, hurt and pitiful, and you needed help, my sort of help, and something humanized you. You were no longer a god. You were something human—"

"Thank God for that!" said Brian.

"Besides," added Joan, twinkling, "you had clay feet. Garry wrote me that you had an Irish temper—"

"And I told you to write him!"

"I asked him all about you," said Joan. "He wrote me such a splendid letter. It made me like you—more. And you can't know what it meant when you wrote and pledged yourself to help Don."

"Garry is my press agent," said Brian with a sniff, "I pay him. And I'll dock him for the part about my temper."

"Brian, so often I—I've wanted to thank you!"

"Don't," he begged. "Please don't. What I did—you see," he stammered, "it just—happened."

"Like the letter you wrote to me, praising someone else to guarantee your own respectability. Is it always someone else, Brian? Don't you ever think of yourself?"

"Lying here," said Brian moodily, "I've thought of little else. There's Hannah with the tablecloth. It can't be six o'clock."

"It is," said Joan. "And Mr. Abbott's coming to supper."

She fled in a panic.

"Will the child never have done with chains?" Hannah demanded as the weeks slipped by.

"When it wasn't Don, it was old Adam. And now it's someone else. And Mr. O'Neill's got more patience, Hughie, than I ever thought was in him."

"I like him better t'other way," said Hughie. "Things is livelier. I'd sooner be diggin' dots than dronin' along so poky."

"It's my opinion," put in Hannah tartly, "that last summer just about spoiled your taste for anything but the life of a pirate. If you must have somebody throwin' a bottle at your head or dumpin' ministers into the river or diggin' treasure, things have come to a pretty pass."

Hughie whistled.

"I ain't the only one that's restless," he defended. "Don's as contraptious as a mule. And I've caught a look in young O'Neill's eye once or twice like old Sim's black mare, mettlesome and anxious to bolt."

"Until Joan slips into a chair with a book or some work," snapped Hannah. "Then he's a lamb. If I was Mr. O'Neill I'd thrash Don into common sense and I'd remind t'other young man, son or no son, that the nurse ain't earnin' her keep. Joan's earnin' it for her."

Alone, Kenny owned, one can not be gay and lunch in glens where the wee folk hide and whisper. And Joan and he himself had chains. He accepted the summer with a wry grimace, reading in its irksome demands a chance for real requital. He found no bitterness in the cup he had set himself to drink. It was the price of Brian's welfare and Brian's peace of mind. But he hungered for Joan and the long, gay days of another summer. When had she grown up so, he wondered impatiently. He missed the romping child with the sun shadows in her hair; he missed her eager tears and laughter. To his skillful touch they had been but strings of a beautiful harp, subtly, unfailingly responsive. Ah! she had been a beautiful promise—that starved child of a summer ago—but the promise fulfilled in the woman, he owned with a rush of feeling, he loved more. Her essential tenderness, strumming kindred chords in his sensitive Celtic soul, aroused an unfamiliar sense of the holiness of love.

And he was splendidly afire with dreams.

In July the little doctor found his patient strong enough for crutches and dismissed the nurse. And unexpectedly John Whitaker arrived, growling his opinion of the rural trains.

"Can you walk without your crutches?" he barked, his glasses oddly moist.

"A little," said Brian.

Whitaker sat down and blinked.

"You don't deserve a job," he grumbled, "turning me down for a dynamite spree, but I'm going to send you to Ireland in the fall. There's a story there—a big one. If," he added grimly, "you can manage to get in."

Late August found the tension of worry at an end. Brian at last was walking. And Don had fought a battle with his books and won.

Kenny's spirits soared.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

ARCADY ELUDES A SEEKER

"Come," Kenny begged one night when the dusk lay thick in the valley. "Let's pace the Gray Man, Joan, in Garry's car. Nobody needs you now as much as I."

His bright dark face pleaded.

The girl smiled.

"Kenny, Kenny, Kenny," she said, "will you ever grow up?"

"Did Peter Pan? Better get your cloak, dear. You may need it."

He went off whistling to the barn. Kenny had blessed the car and Garry many times. He blessed them again as the engine throbbed in the dusk. Hot silence lay upon the ridge, broken only by the noise of insects.

"A long road and a straight road and Samhain at the end!" he sang as Joan climbed in. "And bless the Irish heart of me, dear, there's a moon scrambling up behind the hill and peeping over. Lordy, Lordy!" he added under his breath, "what a moon!"

"'On such a night Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew And with an unthrift love did run to Venice As far as—'

"Hum! I've forgotten. Wonder why Shakespeare looked ahead and harpooned me with that word unthrift. Where to, Jessica? Where shall the unthrift lover drive on such a night?"

Joan stared absently at the road ahead.

"To Ireland," she said.

The answer pleased him.

"I mind me," he said instantly, "of an Irish tale of Finn McCoul."

Joan did not answer.

"Tell me," she said at last. "Finn and you are always delightful."

Kenny stared at her in marked reproach.

"Joan!" he exclaimed.

"What—what is it, Kenny?"

"That's just the sort of polite nothing you learned in New York!"

"I'm sorry, Kenny. I'm—tired. And just for a minute I wasn't listening. You know how it is. You hear an echo in your mind a long while after and answer in a panic." She brushed her cheek against his sleeve with a remorseful gesture of appeal. His arm went round her.

"There!" he said with a sigh of relief. "That's better. I'm lonesome when we're not in tune."

"And the story?"

Kenny told of a fairy face that Finn had seen in a lake among the heather.

"Leaf-brown eyes had the nymph, I take it, and satin-cream skin with a rose showin' through and allurin' lashes maybe dipped in the ink-pots of the fairies."

"What," said Joan from the shelter of his arm, "is a blarney stone?"

"A substitute for lips!" said Kenny instantly and kissed her.

"And Finn?"

"Plunged into the waters of the lake, he did, as any son of Erin would—and found the maid."

But Joan's eyes were absently fixed upon the road again and Kenny abandoned his legend with a sigh until he bethought himself to use its climax in reproach.

"And when Finn reappeared, he was an old, old man, as old as a man may feel when his lady's attention wanders."

Joan colored and laughed, her eyes faintly mischievous, wholly apologetic.

"Finn's youth," Kenny gallantly assured her, "was restored to him by magic and surely there is magic in a woman's smile."

They motored on in a silence that Kenny found depressing. When would Arcady come again, he wondered rebelliously, wistful for the sparkle of that other summer when fairies, silver-shod, had danced upon the moonlit lake. The strain of worry had tired them both.

The wind swept coolly toward them sweet with pine. Wind and pine up here were always mingling. A night—a moon for lovers! The clasp of his arm tightened.

The peace of the night was insistent. After all with worry at an end Arcady might not lie so very far away—it was creeping into his heart, sweet with the music of many trees. Joan too perhaps—he stole a glance at the girl's face, colorless in the moonlight like some soft, exquisite flower—and drew up the emergency brake with a jerk. Her lashes were wet.

"Joan," he exclaimed, "you're not crying!"

She tried to smile and buried her face on his shoulder.

"I think," she said forlornly, "it—it's just because everything has turned out so—so nicely."

He motored homeward, ill at ease, aware after a time that the girl cradled in his arm had fallen asleep. Her tears worried him.

"But I'm quite all right now, Kenny," she protested as they drove up the lane. "It's partly the heat. Why didn't you wake me?"

He swung her lightly to the ground.

"I liked to think I was helping you rest," he said gently. "You need it. Don't wait, dear. It's late."

He climbed back in the car and glided off barnwards, waving his arm. Joan went slowly up the stairway to her room.

Latticed moonlight lay upon a chair by the window. She dropped into it, weary and inert, grateful for the rushing sound of the river; it soothed her with familiar music. A clock downstairs chimed the hour, then the half—and then another hour. Below in the moonlight a man was climbing up from the river.

"Brian," she called breathlessly, "is it you?"

"Yes."

"Dr. Cole will scold. It's twelve o'clock."

Brian tossed his cigarette away with a sigh.

"He'll never know. I've been sitting down there in the punt. The river's silver. Come down for a while," he implored. "All evening I've been as lonely as a leper. Ever since you motored off with Kenny, Don's been a grouch. Can't you climb down the vine?"

"I—I can't, Brian."

"Please, Joan. I'll tell Kenny myself in the morning."

"No," said Joan. "I—can't. I—I wish I could."

"So do I," said Brian. He walked away.

Shaking and sobbing, Joan flung herself upon the bed.

"Sid writes me you're home," Kenny wrote to Garry in September. "What about the car? Come up for a while and drive it home. We can do some sketching. Brian's full of Irish melancholy and waiting for word from Whitaker. He may go any time. Joan's tired and busy with clothes. Don's cranky and I'm rather at a loose end, hunting things to do."

Puzzled, Garry went.

"I can't make out what's wrong," he wrote to Sid, "Kenny's rational enough, but Brian's strung to the breaking point. I suspect it's just as it always has been—they're miserable apart and hopeless together. But the year has been a sobering one, and what used to flash, they bottle up. In my opinion the sooner Brian gets away the better. He's not himself."



CHAPTER XXXIX

THE TENSION SNAPS

Months back Fate had flung out a skein of broken threads to the wind of Chance. In mid September she chose to bring the flying ends together.

It began when Hannah dropped a dipper. Hughie on his way to the wood-box with an armful of kindlings jumped and dropped them with a clatter. And he stepped on Toby's tail and swore. Hannah and Hughie and Toby, startled, shared a sharp moment of resentment.

"Hughie," Hannah's impatience keyed her voice a trifle high, "'pon my honor I don't know what gets into you. Ever since you took to diggin' dots you've been as nervous as a cat. You're full of jumps. It's my opinion if the doctor hadn't told you that Mr. O'Neill himself buried the money in the fireplace, you'd be diggin' dots in a lunatic asylum!"

Hughie's horrified face of warning turned her cold with foreboding. Hannah turned and gasped.

Joan stood behind her.

"Hannah," she asked, "what did you say?"

"I—I don't know," said Hannah, scarlet with confusion. "I'm all unstrung and my head's queer—"

Hughie went out and slammed the door.

"You said that Mr. O'Neill—buried—the money—in Uncle's fireplace!" repeated Joan distinctly. She caught Hannah's arm, her dark frightened eyes imploring. "Hannah, did he?"

Shaking, Hannah put her apron to her eyes. "Hannah, you must tell me. It is important that I know. No, don't cry. Did Mr. O'Neill bury the money—in Uncle's fireplace?"

"Yes," choked Hannah in a low voice. "Oh, Hughie will never forgive me!"

"How do you know?"

"The doctor. Hughie went on diggin', thinking there must be more, until he was sick with nerves. The doctor had to tell him."

"And how did the doctor know?"

The girl's strained quiet helped Hannah to regain her self-control.

"Mr. O'Neill went to Rink's hotel to telephone," she faltered, wiping her eyes, "and Sam Acker put his ear to the door. He—he telephoned for a lot of ragged money—"

Joan caught her breath.

"And then a week later," gulped Hannah, "when the doctor came to tend his wife, Sam told it, for Mr. O'Neill had said the doctor sent him there to telephone. And the doctor never would have told but for Hughie's nerves. He said so when he pledged us both to keep it secret. He spoke wonderful about Mr. O'Neill. That I must say. And he called him somebody Donkeyhote—"

"Where is Mr. O'Neill?"

"He drove down to the village with Mr. Rittenhouse for the mail."

Joan glided away like a shadow.

Don Quixote! And so he had done that strange, fantastic thing for her—and she had given the money away to Don! Joan stopped at the foot of the stairway, her face colorless and unbelieving, her mind casting up a vivid picture of the night of search in the sitting room. It—could—not—be!

Ah, but it could! For Kenny, reckless and on his mettle, was a finished actor. And the morning at the telephone! His silence and constraint had bothered her then not a little. Later, whirling through the blizzard in a taxi, he had begged her not to do it. And he had surrendered in the end with a sigh and smiled and kissed her. His eyes, warmly blue, irresistibly Irish in their tenderness, seemed now to stare at her with sad reproach. Ah, the kindness of him! Hot stinging tears rolled slowly down the girl's white cheeks.

"Joan!" It was Brian's voice behind her.

Joan turned, trembling, blinked and smiled.

Something in her face drove his memory back to the moonlit wood. Niobe on the verge of a passion of tears!

"You look like a sad little brown thrush," he said gently.

His voice, his eyes chilled her with foreboding. They stood in utter silence.

Joan touched the throbbing veins in her throat and moistened her lips.

"You have heard from Mr. Whitaker—"

"Yes, Garry brought the letter up."

"When—"

"I'm sailing in a week. I go from here—to-morrow."

"Brian!"

The terror in her eyes startled him and the tension snapped. An instant later she was crying wildly in his arms. Brian crushed his lips against her cheek, conscious only of an agonizing stab of joy, then Joan pulled away, her eyes dark with grief and shame.

"Oh, Brian, Brian," she whispered passionately, "I—want—to die."

"I've wanted to die for weeks," said Brian. "Almost I think I did."

Joan caught her breath with a shuddering gasp.

"Don't!" said Brian. "I—can't bear to hear you cry. I've always known that I was a pretty poor sort but this—"

His honest eyes begged for understanding,

Joan's face, wet with tears, condoned.

"I—I am worse," she said unsteadily.

He caught her hands rebelliously.

"But you love me," he said wistfully. "That, at least—"

Joan slipped into his arms again with a sob.

"I love you better than my life," she said, "and I may—never—say it again."



Brian pressed his cheek against her hair.

"No," he said. "No. I would not have you say it again, Joan, dear as it is to hear it."

An eternity of minutes seemed to tick away in the silence.

"Brian, you must believe I meant to be true to Kenny—"

"Don't!" he choked, paling at the sound of Kenny's name. "Oh, Kenny, Kenny!"

Joan buried her face in his arm. Both were thinking with hot remorseful hearts of that stormy penitent with the laughing, tender Irish eyes. Both loved him well. And both were pledging themselves to keep his happiness intact.

Joan's tormented memory was busy with pictures: Kenny disastrously sculling the punt to help her, Kenny in the death-chamber shuddering and patient and passionately resolved to stay by her to the end, Kenny with the lantern held high above her head, Kenny digging dots and helping Don to study and Kenny tearing bricks from the ancient fireplace.

She slipped out of his arms in a panic, her face, Brian thought, as white as the old-fashioned lilies in the garden.

"Brian, go—" she choked.

With the truth of the ragged money burning itself into her mind—with Brian so near and yet so far—the touch of his arms was torment.

Hungry for the peace of the pines and the lonely cabin, Joan fled out-of-doors.



CHAPTER XL

THE KING OF YOUTH

Ten minutes later Kenny, coming into the dark, old-fashioned library where Adam's books were once more arrayed upon the shelves, found Don wandering turbulently around the room.

Was this boy ever anything but turbulent, he wondered with impatience. Must he always brood about the boulder and atonement?

Don stopped dead in his tracks, his fingers clenched in his hair, his white face staring queerly; and Kenny, irresistibly reminded of himself in minutes of turmoil, stared back, knowing in a flash of inspiration why the tale of the boulder had made him think of the crash of bouillon cups. The desire of the moment that marked men for disaster! The tongue-tied youngster there with his feet rooted to the ground and his face pale with agitation, was indeed something like himself. Kenny had a moment of pity.

"Mr. O'Neill," said Don with a hard, dry sob, "you know I've wanted to make up to Brian somehow about that boulder. If I hadn't been crazy to drive up the ledge once and if I hadn't lied to Grogan and bullied Tony, Brian wouldn't have spent the rest of the winter in a plaster cast. I—I want to do something for him, something big, and I—I've got to do it in a queer way." He shuddered and wiped his face. Kenny saw that his hands were shaking wildly, and pitied him again. "Mr. O'Neill," he blurted, "Brian loves my sister and she loves him."

It seemed to Kenny that lightning struck with a sinister flare of fire at his feet and hot blinding pieces of the floor were flying all about him.

"How do you know?" he said fiercely. "How do you know? How can you know such a thing as that? You can't! You can't possibly."

"I do," said Don. "I heard them say it."

"Heard them!"

"I was on the porch," said Don, "and I came through the window there to get a book. They were in the hall."

"You listened!"

Don flushed.

"I—I wanted to," he said sullenly. "And I did."

"Ah, yes," said Kenny, wiping his hair back and wondering vaguely why it felt so wet, "you wanted to and you did."

"I wanted to," said Don fiercely, "because I knew Brian loved her. And I knew my sister wasn't happy. She's looked sad and tired and frightened a lot of times, Joan has, and she's cried a lot—"

"Yes," said Kenny, "she has."

Don's challenging eyes swept with stormy suspicion over Kenny's face.

"Mr. O'Neill," he flung out, "don't you blame her. Don't you do it. She was a kid, an awful kid when you came here first, and lonesome. She wanted to be flattered and loved. All girls do. She wasn't happy. She wanted to play and you gave her a chance. You're famous and you've been everywhere and you're a good looker," he gulped courageously, "and maybe you turned her head. I—don't know. I think she loves you an awful lot anyway. But not—not that way. You could have been her father—"

"Yes," said Kenny wincing. "She's younger than Brian." Where had he read that youth was cruel? "Yes, I could have been her father."

"I don't mean you're old," stammered Don, flushing. "I mean—Oh, Mr. O'Neill—" and now Don slipped back into childhood for a second and sobbed aloud—"I—I don't know what I mean. You just—just mustn't blame her. She's my sister. She even patched my clothes."

"I'm not blaming her, Don. God knows I'm not. I'm just wonderin'."

"Joan's going to marry you just the same. She said so. Mr. O'Neill, you've got to do something. You—you've got to!" He clenched his hands and bolted for the door.

"Yes," said Kenny, frowning, "I—I've got to do something. I can't—think—what. Where's Joan?"

"I think she's gone to the cabin. She often went there when Uncle made her cry. Mr. O'Neill," Don clenched one hand and struck it fiercely against the palm of the other, "you've been good to me. I—I'm awful sorry—"

He fled with a sob and Kenny put his hand to his throat to still a painful throbbing.

There was a clanking in his ears. Or was it in his memory? Ah, yes, Adam had said that life was a link in a chain that clanks, and he couldn't escape. Well, he hadn't.

Kenny sat down, conscious of a tired irresolution in his head and a numbness. Nothing seemed clearly defined, save somewhere within him a monumental sharpness as of pain. Joan's happiness he remembered must be the religion of his love.

After that things blurred—curiously. Superstition, ordinarily within him but an artificial twist of fancy, reared a mocking head and reminded him of omens. Sailing over the river long ago he had thought of Hy Brazil, the Isle of Delight that receded always when you followed. Receded! It was very true. Later the wind among the blossoms had been chill and fitful and Joan had been unaware of the romance in the white, sweet drift. Omens! And rain had come, the blossom storm. And Death had spread its sable wing over the first day of his love. He shuddered and closed his eyes.

Separate thoughts rose quiveringly from the blur. He thought of a lantern and Samhain. Samhain, the summer-ending of the druids! Perhaps this was the summer ending of his youth and hope. And he had drank in Adam's room that Samhain night to Destiny—Destiny who had brought him—this!

Still the blur and the separate thoughts stinging into his consciousness like poisoned arrows. Whitaker's voice, persistent and analytical, rang in his ears. The King of Youth! Kenny laughed aloud and tears stung at his eyes. He blinked and laughed again. Why, he was growing up all at once! John would be pleased. Thoughts of Whitaker, Brian, his farcical penance and Joan, became a brilliant phantasmagoria from which for an interval nothing emerged separate or distinct. Then sharp and clear came the dread of Brian's death and the ride over the sleet with Frank. The steering wheel strained in his aching hands and the wheels slid dangerously . . . He did not want to be a failure . . . He wanted passionately after all the turmoil to be Brian's successful parent. If in this instance there was a curious need to wreck his own life in order that he might parent Brian with success, he must not make a mess of it. Once, accidentally, John said, he had almost shipwrecked Brian's life and Brian had stepped out—just in the nick of time. He must not do that again. Brian had suffered enough from self rampant in others.

The King of Youth! . . . The King of Youth! . . . And Brian was twenty-four years old. He must not make him—older. This sharp aging all in a moment was fraught with pain.

His weary ears resented the mocking persistence of Whitaker's voice. Kenny's happy-go-lucky self-indulgence, it said, had often spelled for Brian discomfort of a definite sort. . . . Well, it—should—not—spell—pain. . . . And if in the past his generosity had always been congenial, now it should hurt. Was he about to learn something of the psychology of sacrifice that Adam had said he ought to know?

He swung rebelliously to his feet. Why must the fullness of life come through sacrifice? Why must all things good and permanent and true come only out of suffering? Why must men pay for their dreams with pain?

He moved mechanically toward the door. . . . Yes, he cared more for Joan's happiness than for his own. And she was suffering. Why, the tired truth of it was, he loved them both enough to want to see them happy . . . And he would be a part of Don's erratic atonement.

He smiled wryly and realized with a start that he was already out-of-doors, walking dazedly toward the cabin in the pines. The fresh, sweet wind blew through his hair and into his face, but the blur persisted, filled with voices and memories and promptings from God alone knew where.

The odor of pine was sharply reminiscent. . . . And then with a shock that stung him out of inhibition he was staring in at the cabin window. Joan sat by the table, her head upon her arm, her shoulders heaving.

"Poor child!" he said heavily. "Poor child!" And savagely cursed the summer pictures that flamed in his mind at the sight of her. The cabin, the wistaria ladder, the punt, the girl by the willow in the gold brocade—

Well, he must go hurriedly toward that door or not at all. His courage was failing.

The sound of the door startled her. Joan leaped to her feet and stood, shaking violently, by the table, one hand clutching at the edge of it in terror.

In that tongue-tied minute, if he had but known, with his fingers clenched in his hair and his face scarlet, he was like that turbulent boy who such a little while ago had crashed into his life with a sob.

Joan's agonized eyes, wet with tears, brought home to him the need of a steady head . . . and responsibility. Yes, he must keep his two feet solidly on the ground and face a gigantic responsibility.

"Don't cry, dear, please!" he said gently. "It's just one of the things that can't be helped. Don told me. He overheard."

Her low cry hurt—viciously. And she came flying wildly across the room to his arms, sobbing out her grief and remorse.

"Oh, Kenny, Kenny." she sobbed. "I—want—you—both."

His shaking arms sheltered her. A heart-broken child! He must remember that. And, as Don said, he could have been her father.

"Happiness with the least unhappiness to others, girleen," he reminded with his cheek against her hair. "Remember?"

"Yes," she choked.

"You must go to Brian. Any foolish notion of sacrifice now will only tangle the lives of all of us."

"But—I cannot forget! Kenny, if only you would hate me!"

"I didn't mean to love you, mavourneen. It was like the tale of Killarney. I left a cover off in my heart and a spring gushed out and flooded my life."

"I am blaming myself!"

"You must not do that. You were in love with love. You must now know how different it—" But he could not say it, courageous as he felt.

"And the money!" choked Joan. "Oh, Kenny, Kenny, the ragged money! And I gave it away. And you were so good—so good!"

He frowned, unable to understand at once the relevance of the ragged money and realized that Joan was sobbing into his shoulder the tale of an eavesdropping bartender and a doctor. He accepted it, dazedly, thunderstruck at the alertness of his Nemesis who missed no single chance to shoot an arrow.

"And Don must give that money back. I will tell him—"

"No," said Kenny. "No, he must not."

She stared at him in wonder.

"Mavourneen," he pleaded wistfully, "may I—not do that at least for someone who is yours? Don needs it."

He could not know that his kindness was to her more poignant torment than his bitterest reproach. He thought as the color fled from her lips and left her gray and trembling, that she was fainting. He held her closely in his arms.

She slipped away from him and sat down weakly in a chair. Dusk lay beyond the windows. Joan covered her face with her hands.

"The Gray Man," she whispered. "He's peeping in."

Pain flared intolerably in Kenny's throat and stabbed into his heart. He drew the shades with a shudder and lighted the lamp.

In the supreme moment of his agony, came inspiration. He must save them all with a lie! Queer that, queer and contradictory! Yes, after practicing the truth, he must save them all from shipwreck with a lie.

"Girleen," he said, "there is something now that I must tell you. I thought never to say it. You came into my dream that day beneath the willow in gold brocade, with afterglow behind you and an ancient boat. I am an Irishman—and a painter. 'Twas a spot of rare enchantment and I said to myself, I am falling in love—again."

"Again!" echoed Joan a little blankly.

"Again!" said Kenny inexorably. "You see, Joan, dear, I was used to falling in love. There are men like that. You and Brian would never understand."

"No," said the girl, shocked. "No."

"You made a mistake, the sort of mistake that drives half the lifeboats on the rocks. I mean, dear, falling in love with love. But you're over that. It was—a different sort of love with me. I knew as we crossed the river that first day in the punt that the madness could not last. You see—it never had."

"Kenny!"

If Joan in that moment had remembered the Irishman tearing bricks from the fireplace in a spasm of histrionic zeal, she might have distrusted the steadiness of his level, kindly glance. She might have guessed that again he was reckless and on his mettle. But she did not remember.

"Romance and mystery," said Kenny, lighting a cigarette and smiling at her through a cloud of smoke, "were always the death of me. My fancy's wayward and romantic. Afterward your will-of-the-wisp charm held me oddly. You kept yourself apart and precious. And I was always pursuing. It was provocative—and unfamiliar. And then came Samhain, the—the summer-ending." There was an odd note in his voice. "I faced a new experience. I had gone over the usual duration of my madness and I thought," he smiled, "I thought I was loving you for good. But—"

Her dark eyes stared at him, wistful and yet in the moment of her hope a shade reproachful.

"And—your love—did not last, Kenny?" It was a forlorn little voice, for all its unmistakable note of rejoicing. How very young she was—and childlike!

"It—did—not—last!" said Kenny deliberately. "It never does with me. I should have known it. I love you sincerely, girleen. I always shall. But I love you as I would have loved—my daughter."

"Your daughter! Kenny, why then did you speak so of the flood of Killarney?"

"I was testing you. You can see for yourself. I could not honorably tell you this, dear, if you still cared."

"But I do care," cried Joan, flinging out her hands with a gesture of appeal. "I love you so much, Kenny, that it hurts."

"But not in the way you love Brian."

"No."

"And that, mavourneen, is as it should be."

He told her of the stage mother. Let the lie go with the castle he had built upon it. And he would begin afresh.

"Ah," said Joan, dismissing it with shining eyes, "there, Kenny, you meant only to be kind."

He wondered wearily why the lie with all its torment had not shocked her. Truth was queer.

Joan glided toward the door. He caught in her face the look of a white flame and dropped his eyes. A Botticelli look. Ah, well, it was beautiful to be young and joyous!

"I must tell Brian," she said.

"Yes," said Kenny. "Of course."

And she was gone. Kenny lay back in his chair and closed his eyes; the sound of her flying feet death in his ears.



CHAPTER XLI

WHEN THE ISLE OF DELIGHT RECEDED

Often Kenny had appreciatively dramatized for himself possible minutes of tragedy. They were always opportunities for Shakespearian soliloquy and gesture.

Now he lay back in his chair much too tired for tragedy and gesture. And the need of soliloquy would have found him dumb. Upper-most in his mind was a dream in which Joan had peeped down at him from a balloon that went ever and ever higher—like the Isle of Delight that was always—receding. He had sensed in her to-night that aerial aloofness he had felt when he blocked old Adam out from his dream of love. Liebestraum! The stabbing pain in his heart grew hotter.

It was lonely here in the pines. He wondered why he had never caught before that chill pervading sense of solitude—sad solitude. The pines whispered. It was not merely poetry. They whispered plaintively. . . . And he was very tired.

Rebellion came flaming into his apathy and Kenny caught his breath and held it, fiercely striking his hands together again and again. Sacrifice and suffering! Must it be like this? What had he written in his notebook anyway? He seemed almost to have forgotten.

The book opened at a touch to the page he wanted.

"Sunsets and vanity," he read drearily and penciled the rebuke away with a faint smile. Like his hairbrained, unquenchable youth, bright with folly, the sunsets and vanity lay in the past. Vanity! Ah, dear God! he could not feel humbler.

Nor was he irresponsible—or a failure as a parent. He had made good to-night. Surely, surely, he had made good to-night. The one thing that he might not mark out was his failure as a painter.

"Need to suffer and learn something of the psychology of sacrifice." Well, he was—learning. . . . Nay, he had learned. Kenny fiercely drew his pencil through the sentence and read the rest.

The truth, though he did not fully understand it, he would always try to tell. He had no debts. The chairs in the studio were cleared of litter. A plebeian regularity had made him uncomfortably provident.

So much for that part of his self-arraignment. One by one he marked the items out and stared with a twisted smile at the next.

"I borrow Brian's girls, his money and his clothes!" Hum! Once Garry had barked at him for sending orchids to a girl or two whom Brian liked.

The money, the clothes, the paraphernalia he had pawned, were returned. As for the girls—well, Brian had retaliated in kind and perhaps the debt in its concentration of payment, was abundantly squared.

"Indolence." That the record of his winter could disprove.

And finally, he read what, after Adam's telling of the truth, he had scribbled at the end.

"Life is a battle. I do not fight. And life is not an individual adventure."

It wasn't. It was a chain that clanked.

"I do not fight," he read again and crossed it out.

"Adam, old man," he said wryly, "I think to-night I've done some fighting. And the fight has just begun."

He tore the page out, struck a match and burned it. Again he dropped back in his chair and closed his eyes.

Into the blur came Garry.

"Kenny!" he called. "Kenny!"

Kenny opened his eyes with a start. Garry stood by the cabin door, his hand upon the knob.

"Don asked me to come. Kenny, I was on the porch. Great God! the kid must have gone crazy."

"You heard?"

"Yes."

"He wanted to—atone."

"And now that he's cooled down enough to remember your kindness, Kenny, he's breaking his heart over you. A queer kid! I almost thrashed him. He's tramping off his brain-storm."

"And Joan?"

"With Brian." Garry looked away. "They have forgotten the world," he added bitterly.

"Kenny, how did you manage? That look in her face—"

"I lied."

"Gallant liar!" said Garry huskily. "I knew you would. It was the only kind way."

"Almost," said Kenny, "I did not remember to lie in time. Truth is a thing I cannot understand."

The sympathy in Garry's eyes unnerved him.

"Garry," he flamed, "why did I practice the telling of truth to end now with a lie? Why did Joan plead for a year to learn to be my wife and learn in it—not to be?"

"God knows!" said Garry gently. "Why did agony come to Brian at the hands of a boy he'd befriended? And then—to you?"

"It is the Samhain of my life," said Kenny rising. "And I am no longer John Whitaker's King of Youth. I think my youth died back there when Don thrust it aside, not meaning, I take it, to be cruel. But I grew up all at once." He frowned. "Drowning men, they say, have a kaleidoscopic vision of the past. I think sitting here that came to me. Perhaps, Garry, if Eileen had lived I would have been different—steadier. I think I loved her. I think it would have lasted. A child is a beautiful link. Perhaps that fever of vanity that grew to a burning in my veins would never have started. Started, it was like a conflagration. It drove Brian to sunsets. God knows what it didn't do. I thought only of myself—always. That desire for adulation in a woman's eyes, that curious persistent fever was, I'm sure, a sort of sex vanity. It has nearly ruined many another man's life. It nearly ruined mine. Always when I was drifting into new madness, I couldn't work. I dreamed. The Isle of Delight, always receding! I sang and whistled. The King of Youth! Only when I was drifting out again, could I bend myself to concentration and sanity. And then another look in a girl's soft eyes—and more vanity and self and delirium. But I'm tired. I want to look ahead to—to quiet and steadiness and work."

Garry, with the husk still in his throat, wandered off to the window.

"Garry!"

Garry wheeled and found a wistful, boyish Kenny with his fingers in his hair.

"I'm no longer a failure as a parent?"

"No!" said Garry with decision.

"And God knows I haven't been a failure as a lover. I'm prayin' I shan't always be a failure as a painter. It's the one thing left. Somewhere in Ireland, Garry, nine silent fairies blow beneath a caldron. They know the secrets of the future. I'd like to be peepin'."

He was to know in time that the caldron held for him peace and big achievement.

"I wish I could help!" said Garry.

"Garry, could you—would you drive me home to-night?"

"Anything!"

"You'll not be mindin'?"

"No. It's better."

"Come," said Kenny, his color high. "We'll be facin' it now."

They went in silence through the pines.



CHAPTER XLII

THE END OF KENNY'S SONG

A light flickered on the porch where Hannah hovered around the supper table, puzzled and annoyed.

"I'm glad somebody's come at last," she exclaimed a trifle tartly. "Every bug on the ridge has been staring at the supper table through the screens. And I promised Mis' Owen to drive over there to-night with Hughie."

"Where's Brian?"

"He went down to the village with Joan."

"And Don?"

"Don said he'd eat his supper when he came. It might be late."

Kenny, whistling a madcap hornpipe, glinted at the table with approval.

"Off with ye, now, Hannah, darlin'," he said. "I'll stare the bugs down until they come."

"They ought to be here now." Hannah's eyes strained, frowning, toward the lane.

"Ho, Brian!" Kenny called.

"Ho!" came a distant shout. And then: "Coming, Kenny."

Had Kenny's call been one of reassurance? To Garry, miserably intent upon the ordeal ahead, the big Irishman, whistling softly in his chair, had sent a message through the dark to ease the tension. Already the daredevil light danced wantonly in his eyes.

Hannah trotted off in better humor.

Dreading the supper hour, dreading the sound of steps upon the walk, Garry smoked and gnawed his lips. The meeting must be painful. . . . Now they were coming along the gravel . . . and now . . . He had undervalued Kenny's tact.

The latch of the screen door clicked. Kenny rummaged for cigarettes and struck a match. Joan had slipped to her place at the table before he threw the match away. Then he smiled. His eyes were a curious droll confessional that Brian seemed at once to understand. They deplored the fickle strain in his blood that doomed all madness of the heart to end in time. Brian had seen that look too many times to doubt it now.

"Come, Garry." Joan brought him into the circle at the table with a smile. Garry joined it with a sinking heart. He would have had that shining look of wonder in her eyes less unrestrained. But the shadows for Joan, thanks to Kenny's lie, lay already dimly in the past.

The merriment of the supper hour Garry thought of later with a pang. He ate but little, fascinated by the reckless spontaneity of Kenny's mood. It put them all at ease. The big kind Spartan will behind it brought a catch to Garry's throat. Daredevil glints laughed in Kenny's eyes. Again and again Garry found himself staring at the actor's vivid face in a panic of unbelief.

"Garry's had a letter," said Kenny presently. "He's driving back to-night."

"Garry!"

"I'm sorry." Garry rose. "I'm afraid," he added, glancing at his watch, "that I'll have to slip upstairs and sling some odds and ends in my suit case. Mind, Kenny?"

"Run along," said Kenny. "I'll be up in a minute." He drummed an irresponsible tune upon the table and looked apologetic.

"If you'll not be mindin', Brian," he began, "I'll go along. He doesn't know the roads—"

Brian eyed him with a familiar glint of authority.

"I thought so," he said slowly. "I saw it coming. You're just in the mood for what Jan calls 'rocketing' and Garry's letter, of course, was the spark. Luckily, old boy, I'm on the job again. You've been tearing around unguarded a shade too long."

"I've got to go," barked Kenny, pushing back his chair. "I've had his car for months. Do you suppose I want him losing his way all night—"

He fumed off rebelliously, talking as he went.

Brian's eyes followed him through the doorway.

"Hum!" he said grimly. "'Richard is himself again!' You mustn't blame him, Joan," he added. "He was always like that. He can't help it. I mean, dear, tumbling in and out of love. I always knew the symptoms. Falling in, he'd whistle softly and his eyes would shine. He'd be up in the clouds and altogether gay and charming, his work would begin to pall and he'd put it aside until he began to run down. I always knew when he came to disillusion. His conscience would begin to bother him about work. He'd be moody and discontented and a desperate flurry of painting would follow until the next girl smiled."

He reached across the table and caught her hands.

"It is hard to believe it all," he said simply. "And Ireland for a honeymoon!"

The look of shining content in Joan's eyes deepened.

"Oh, Brian," she said. "I shall love it, I know!"

Kenny climbed the stairway in a daze and packed his suit case. Everywhere he felt the eyes of Adam Craig upon him—less and less unkind. They stared at him from the windows by the orchard. They stared over the creaking banister as he stumbled down the stairway with his courage ebbing. They stared from the library where the porch light glimmered through the windows. . . . Fall was in the wind to-night. The old house creaked. Adam's spirit swept in always with a sighing wind. Kenny shivered. A bleak place—the ridge—and haunted.

With a shock he found himself upon the porch. At the foot of the steps Garry waited in the car, his gauntleted hands drumming nervously upon the wheel. If for a minute stark, incredulous terror swept through Kenny's veins, his laughing lips belied it. Then he kissed Joan lightly on the cheek and went, whistling, down the steps with Brian.

"And you, Brian?" he said, halting on the lower step to light a cigarette. "What shall I tell John?"

"Tell him all," said Brian. He talked hurriedly of his plans.

Kenny held out his hand.

"God speed, boy!" he said.

Garry—unsentimental Garry—blinked as the car shot down the lane. He clashed his gears and shuddered.

Brian stared.

"Phew!" he whistled as Joan came down the steps. "Garry's driving like a blacksmith."

They clung to each other in the dark and watched the headlights play upon the trees.

From the end of the lane came Kenny's final gift of reassurance. His rollicking voice swept into the quiet, soft with brogue, as care-free in song as it had been earlier in laughter:

"'I'll love thee evermore Eileen a roon! I'll bless thee o'er and o'er Eileen a roon!'"

Brian laughed softly.

"Joan! Joan!" he exclaimed in a rush of feeling. Their lips met.

"'Oh! for thy sake I'll tread Where plains of Mayo spread.'"

Brian's heart went out to the irresponsible penitent rocketing in song.

"Dear lunatic!" he said.

Fainter in the night wind came the end of Kenny's song:

"'By hope still fondly led, Eileen a roon.'"