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

"I approve the att.i.tude," 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 G.o.d.

You were something human--"

"Thank G.o.d 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 pa.s.s."

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 gla.s.ses 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 x.x.xVIII

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. n.o.body 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.