"The cheese in all probability," suggested Whitaker mildly, "wouldn't be under the piano. Or would it? And don't bother anyway. I took the liberty of buying an emergency wedge while I was out."

Kenny wiped his forehead in amazed relief and piously thanked G.o.d he hadn't wasted his appet.i.te on middle-aged cakes.

"If you hadn't come when you did," he said, "I'd likely had to eat 'em, thanks to Reynolds. Now I'll send 'em up to H. B." He peered disgustedly into the bag and removed an irrelevant ace of spades. Its hibernation there seemed for an instant to annoy him as well it might.

There had been a furore in whist about it barely a week before. Then he used it irresponsibly for an I.O.U. and impaled it upon a strange looking spike that seemed to pinion a heterogeneous admission of petty debt.

Together they made the rarebit. Whitaker waited with foreboding for the storm to break. But for some reason, though he was constrained and impatient and feverishly active, Kenny avoided the subject of Brian.

He lost poise and patience all at once, pushed aside his plate and challenged Whitaker with a look.

"Why did you want to eat in the studio?"

"I came to talk."

"Whitaker," bl.u.s.tered Kenny, "where's Brian?"

"Working."

"On your paper?"

"No. Brian's left New York. He's driving somebody's car. And I found the job for him through my paper. When he has money enough he plans to tramp off into G.o.d's green world of spring to get himself in trim.

Says he's stale and tired and thinking wrong. In the fall he's going abroad for me and that, Kenny, is about all I can tell you."

"You mean," flared Kenny, rising with a ragged napkin in his hand, "you mean, John, it's all you will tell me!"

"Sit down," said Whitaker, toasting a cracker over the alcohol flame.

"I prefer a sensible talk without fireworks."

Surprised and nettled, Kenny obeyed in spite of himself.

"Now," went on Whitaker quietly, "I came here to-night because I'm Brian's friend and yours." He ignored the incredulous arch of Kenny's eyebrows. "Where Brian is, where he will be, I don't propose to tell you, now or at any other time. His wheres and his whens are the boy's own business. His whys I think you know. He won't be back."

"He will!" thundered Kenny and thumped upon the table with his fist.

Whitaker patiently rea.s.sembled his supper.

"I think not," he said.

"You're not here to think," blazed Kenny. "You're here to tell me what you know."

"I'm here," corrected John Whitaker, "to get a few facts out of my system for your own good and Brian's. Kenny, how much of the truth can you stand?"

Kenny threw up his hands with a reminiscent gesture of despair.

"Truth!" he repeated. "Truth!"

"I know," put in Whitaker, "that you regard the truth as something sacred, to be handled with delicacy and discretion. But--"

Kenny told him sullenly to tell it if he could.

"I don't propose to urge Brian back here for a good many reasons. In the first place, he's not a painter--"

"John," interrupted Kenny hotly, "you are no judge of that. I, Kennicott O'Neill, am his father."

"And more's the pity," said Whitaker bluntly, "for you've made a mess of it. That's another reason."

Kenny turned a dark red.

"You mean?"

"I mean, Kenny," said Whitaker, his glance calm and level, "that as a parent for Brian, you are an abject failure."

The word stung. It was the first time in his life that Kenny had faced it. That he, Kennicott O'Neill, Academician, with Heaven knows how many medals of distinction, could fail at anything, was a new thought, bewildering and bitter. This time he escaped from the table and flung up a window. Whitaker, he grumbled, never toasted crackers without burning them. Whitaker brought him back with a look.

"Sit down," he said again. "I don't propose to talk while you roam around the studio and kick things."

Kenny obeyed. He looked a little white.

"I've tried to think this thing out fairly," said Whitaker. "Why as a parent for Brian you're a failure--"

"Well?"

"And the first and fundamental cause of your failure is, I think, your hairbrained, unquenchable youth."

Kenny stared at him in astounded silence.

"I remember once around the fire here you told a Celtic tale of some golden islands--Tirnanoge, wasn't it?--the Land of the Young--"

Might have been, Kenny said perversely. He didn't remember.

"Ossian lived there with the daughter of the King of Youth for three hundred years that seemed but three," reminded Whitaker. "Well, no matter. The point is this: The Land of the Young and the King of Youth always make me think of you."

"It is true," said Kenny with biting sarcasm, "that I still have hair and teeth. It is also true that I am the respectable if unsuccessful parent of a son twenty-three years old and I myself am forty-four."

"Forty-four years young," admitted Whitaker. "And Brian on the other hand is twenty-three years old. There you have it. You know precisely what I mean, Kenny. Youth isn't always a matter of years. It's a state of being. Sometimes it's an affliction and sometimes a gift.

Sometimes it's chronic and sometimes it's contagious enough to start an epidemic. You're as young and irresponsible as the wind. You've never grown up. G.o.d knows whether or not you ever will. But Brian has.

There's the clash."

"Go on," said Kenny with a dangerous flash of interest in his eyes.

"You've an undeniable facility, John, with what you call the truth."

"It's an unfortunate characteristic of highly temperamentalized individuals--"

"Painters, Irishmen and O'Neills," put in Kenny with sulky impudence.

"That they frequently skirt the rocks for themselves with amazing skill. I mean just this: They don't always shipwreck their own lives."

Was that, Kenny would like to know, an essential of successful parenthood?

"I mean," he paraphrased dryly, "must you wreck your own life, John, to parent somebody else with skill?" The wording of this rather pleased him. He brightened visibly.