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

"'Tis Samhain, Adam," said Kenny, "the summer ending of the druids.

And to-night the hills are open and the fairies are all out a-temptin'

mortals. I myself have heard the fairy pipes showerin' sweetness everywhere. Wonderful music, Adam! Silver-soft and allurin' and the kind you can't forget! It throws you into a trance and fills you with beautiful longing. I forgot to come home. There! I must tell Hannah to put a light under the churn to-night. Then the fairies, hating fire, can't bewitch it."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'Tis Samhain, Adam," said Kenny, "the summer ending of the druids."]

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

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

"Are you mad?" he demanded.

"Quite!" said Kenny.

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

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

Adam frowned and shivered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was Hughie, his face pale and disturbed.

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

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

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

"But, Hughie, he couldn't!"

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

"How far?"

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

"Poor devil!" said Kenny, shocked.

He dressed quickly. Hannah helped him hitch the old mare to the buggy and found him nervous and unfamiliar with his task. Kenny drove off down the lane, oppressed by the bleak wind and the bare black tangle of branches ahead of him. The tragic effort of Adam's wasted legs had left him startled and uneasy. For the life of him he could not put out of his mind the tale of the old Irish woman and the chair she had left by the fire on the Eve of All Souls for the visit of her dead son. It had bothered Adam Craig and made him shudder. It bothered Kenny now.

He wished he hadn't remembered it last night or to-day. But the sound of Nellie's hoofs plodding along the soft dirt road was no more recurrent than his own foreboding. It filled him with sadness and guilt. Adam perhaps had dragged himself to the sitting room fire in a drunken fit of superst.i.tion. Seeking what? Someone he had _wronged_?

The sinister spark inflamed his fancy. His brain whirled.

Inexplicably the tale of the fairy mill and the rascal who stole the widow's bag of meal linked itself with the mishap of the night before.

Then too Adam had fallen forward in his chair unconscious.

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

He telephoned the doctor's farm and found him ready to start his weary ambulant day; hamlet to hamlet, farm to farm, until dusk and often after. The bare thought of it filled Kenny with sympathetic gloom.

Then his brain began again to burn in speculation. Frowning, he turned back homewards up the hill and through the wood, where the road lay, rough and lonely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And it will last?"

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

"Until the judgment day!" persisted Kenny.

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