"Ah," said Joan, dismissing it with shining eyes, "there, Kenny, you meant only to be kind."

He wondered wearily why the lie with all its torment had not shocked her. Truth was queer.

Joan glided toward the door. He caught in her face the look of a white flame and dropped his eyes. A Botticelli look. Ah, well, it was beautiful to be young and joyous!

"I must tell Brian," she said.

"Yes," said Kenny. "Of course."

And she was gone. Kenny lay back in his chair and closed his eyes; the sound of her flying feet death in his ears.

CHAPTER XLI

WHEN THE ISLE OF DELIGHT RECEDED

Often Kenny had appreciatively dramatized for himself possible minutes of tragedy. They were always opportunities for Shakespearian soliloquy and gesture.

Now he lay back in his chair much too tired for tragedy and gesture. And the need of soliloquy would have found him dumb. Upper-most in his mind was a dream in which Joan had peeped down at him from a balloon that went ever and ever higher--like the Isle of Delight that was always--receding.

He had sensed in her to-night that aerial aloofness he had felt when he blocked old Adam out from his dream of love. Liebestraum! The stabbing pain in his heart grew hotter.

It was lonely here in the pines. He wondered why he had never caught before that chill pervading sense of solitude--sad solitude. The pines whispered. It was not merely poetry. They whispered plaintively. . . .

And he was very tired.

Rebellion came flaming into his apathy and Kenny caught his breath and held it, fiercely striking his hands together again and again. Sacrifice and suffering! Must it be like this? What had he written in his notebook anyway? He seemed almost to have forgotten.

The book opened at a touch to the page he wanted.

"Sunsets and vanity," he read drearily and penciled the rebuke away with a faint smile. Like his hairbrained, unquenchable youth, bright with folly, the sunsets and vanity lay in the past. Vanity! Ah, dear G.o.d! he could not feel humbler.

Nor was he irresponsible--or a failure as a parent. He had made good to-night. Surely, surely, he had made good to-night. The one thing that he might not mark out was his failure as a painter.

"Need to suffer and learn something of the psychology of sacrifice."

Well, he was--learning. . . . Nay, he had learned. Kenny fiercely drew his pencil through the sentence and read the rest.

The truth, though he did not fully understand it, he would always try to tell. He had no debts. The chairs in the studio were cleared of litter.

A plebeian regularity had made him uncomfortably provident.

So much for that part of his self-arraignment. One by one he marked the items out and stared with a twisted smile at the next.

"I borrow Brian's girls, his money and his clothes!" Hum! Once Garry had barked at him for sending orchids to a girl or two whom Brian liked.

The money, the clothes, the paraphernalia he had p.a.w.ned, were returned.

As for the girls--well, Brian had retaliated in kind and perhaps the debt in its concentration of payment, was abundantly squared.

"Indolence." That the record of his winter could disprove.

And finally, he read what, after Adam's telling of the truth, he had scribbled at the end.

"Life is a battle. I do not fight. And life is not an individual adventure."

It wasn't. It was a chain that clanked.

"I do not fight," he read again and crossed it out.

"Adam, old man," he said wryly, "I think to-night I've done some fighting. And the fight has just begun."

He tore the page out, struck a match and burned it. Again he dropped back in his chair and closed his eyes.

Into the blur came Garry.

"Kenny!" he called. "Kenny!"

Kenny opened his eyes with a start. Garry stood by the cabin door, his hand upon the k.n.o.b.

"Don asked me to come. Kenny, I was on the porch. Great G.o.d! the kid must have gone crazy."

"You heard?"

"Yes."

"He wanted to--atone."

"And now that he's cooled down enough to remember your kindness, Kenny, he's breaking his heart over you. A queer kid! I almost thrashed him.

He's tramping off his brain-storm."

"And Joan?"

"With Brian." Garry looked away. "They have forgotten the world," he added bitterly.

"Kenny, how did you manage? That look in her face--"

"I lied."

"Gallant liar!" said Garry huskily. "I knew you would. It was the only kind way."

"Almost," said Kenny, "I did not remember to lie in time. Truth is a thing I cannot understand."

The sympathy in Garry's eyes unnerved him.

"Garry," he flamed, "why did I practice the telling of truth to end now with a lie? Why did Joan plead for a year to learn to be my wife and learn in it--not to be?"

"G.o.d knows!" said Garry gently. "Why did agony come to Brian at the hands of a boy he'd befriended? And then--to you?"

"It is the Samhain of my life," said Kenny rising. "And I am no longer John Whitaker's King of Youth. I think my youth died back there when Don thrust it aside, not meaning, I take it, to be cruel. But I grew up all at once." He frowned. "Drowning men, they say, have a kaleidoscopic vision of the past. I think sitting here that came to me. Perhaps, Garry, if Eileen had lived I would have been different--steadier. I think I loved her. I think it would have lasted. A child is a beautiful link. Perhaps that fever of vanity that grew to a burning in my veins would never have started. Started, it was like a conflagration. It drove Brian to sunsets. G.o.d knows what it didn't do. I thought only of myself--always. That desire for adulation in a woman's eyes, that curious persistent fever was, I'm sure, a sort of s.e.x vanity. It has nearly ruined many another man's life. It nearly ruined mine. Always when I was drifting into new madness, I couldn't work. I dreamed. The Isle of Delight, always receding! I sang and whistled. The King of Youth! Only when I was drifting out again, could I bend myself to concentration and sanity. And then another look in a girl's soft eyes--and more vanity and self and delirium. But I'm tired. I want to look ahead to--to quiet and steadiness and work."