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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kreiling was right.

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

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

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

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

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

Abbott. Kenny struck off hurriedly toward the south.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once more the firefly glimmer glided toward him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"G.o.d forbid! I can't--I won't let you go."

"You must!"

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

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

"Bless your heart!"

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

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

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

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

Kenny groaned.

CHAPTER XX

THE CHAIR BY THE FIRE

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

"You're late!" he said.

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