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

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

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

"Yes?"

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

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

"Oh!"

"And evidently it isn't popular."

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

"Joan!"

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

"I'm waiting."

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

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

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

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

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

"Kenny, please say something!"

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

"It's fair--"

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

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

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

"Ann had so many, many things to say against it. She said she was trying to see it all with your eyes--as a guardian. But I told her you're hardly ever--a guardian. And your Bohemia is democratic, isn't it? And painters are respectable and worthy men and nothing like so flighty as you read. You've said so yourself. And I like to work.

And there are so many charming girls who are models and Jan's cousin is a Va.s.sar girl--" In her eagerness to convince him she lost her breath.

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

And when he had rung off, he sat down weakly and laughed, his laugh unmusical and sad. The dreadful, dreadful irony of it! How could he deny her? How _could_ he? He who had surrounded her with women friends, talented and independent, who believed in the gospel of work!

He liked her generosity. He liked her willingness to work. He blessed the dear, selfless instincts of her heart, his eyes moist and tender.

And yet . . . and yet! Kenny laughed again. He had hidden his own money in the fireplace to send through college a runaway youth he had never seen!

On the way home from Madame Morny's in a taxi, for the snow had become a blizzard, he made one final desperate effort to break her resolution.

It was futile. Again she was pa.s.sionately eager to please him. Again he found it a problem that involved her happiness and peace of mind.

Again, with his heart sore, be kissed her and surrendered to her wishes with a sigh.

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

"Kenny, I'm so glad you asked me to bring mother's trunks with me,"

Joan told him. "Aranyi has asked me to pose in the gold brocade."

Something sharp stabbed at Kenny's heart.

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

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

"I'm sorry, old man," Kenny finished inexorably, "but nothing under forty need apply. You, my son, are particularly flighty and fickle.

Just now you happen to be raving about Peggy, but every pretty face, I've noticed, makes you forget the one before."

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

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

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

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

Otherwise he himself could have painted Joan in the gold brocade and in all the others.

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

CHAPTER x.x.xI

FATE STABS

March came to Kenny and found his studio with its haunting odor of coffee and cigarettes, his brushes, his head and his heart, furiously at work. He was giving himself up to love and labor with a Celtic intensity that Garry found appalling. He planned endlessly to one purpose: Joan's happiness, Joan's pleasure, Joan's future with him.

The memory of the ragged money laid aside for Don he dismissed with a wry smile, gritting his teeth. What mattered in the face of the splendid fact that he was so joyously, so recklessly, so absurdly happy?

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

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

"You told Kenneth his dancing urchin was rotten--"