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Updated: June 21, 2025
"Any girl in Kenny's life would be beautiful or she wouldn't be there." As for Kenny, his path was pleasant, as it always was. If a waving arm was not bidding for his attention, it was a laughing hail or a hearty hand upon his shoulder. His bright dark face sparkled with the zest of popularity. Joan thought him as care-free as a boy.
And Garry curiously enough caught the tantalizing charm of her sweetness that had baffled many an older and wiser man. Shadows had no part in the wonder of Kenny's winter, but an inclination to forget his quarrel with Brian and his flare of penance, violent and incomplete for he had never reached the longed-for grail of his son's forgiveness troubled him vaguely.
Why, now, when Joan was slipping into his life, a lonely waif of a girl in a black gown he hated, why must he think years back to that soft-eyed Irish girl and Brian? Had he broken his pledge to her, driving her son away with a passion of self no less definite for its careless gayety? Eileen's son! Eileen's son! Sadness tore at Kenny's heart and twitched at his dry, white lips.
And long afterward she was to recognize in that eager gallantry the finest of tact. "It's a delight just to be wonderin'! You called me Mr. O'Neill!" he added blankly. "Some letters had tumbled from your pocket." Kenny's brow cleared. "Besides, whenever the horn blew lately I thought it might be you." This was too amazing. But the girl's eyes were beautiful, ingenuous and wholly sincere.
He told Adam Craig he was a miser. In the dreadful silence the tick of the old clock on the mantel seemed to Kenny's distracted ears a perpetuity of measured taps upon a death-drum. He thought of Poe and the pit and the pendulum. He thought of Joan and told himself fiercely that he did it all for her; for her he was winding around himself a chain foredoomed to clank.
The sun in a last blaze was going down behind the higher line of trees. Roof peaks and chimney lay against a mat of gold. Crows winging toward the forest to the south speckled the sky behind the chimney. To Kenny's ardent fancy, the old house, built of gray and ancient stone, became a rugged cameo set in gold and trees. Whatever arable land belonged to the hill-farm lay away from the river.
Don's cranky and I'm rather at a loose end, hunting things to do." Puzzled, Garry went. "I can't make out what's wrong," he wrote to Sid, "Kenny's rational enough, but Brian's strung to the breaking point. I suspect it's just as it always has been they're miserable apart and hopeless together. But the year has been a sobering one, and what used to flash, they bottle up.
Kenny's irritability grew too marked to be ignored. Jan and Sid and Garry met and talked him over. "What's wrong with him?" demanded Sid, amazed. "Garry, what is it? He's as quarrelsome as a magpie and nothing suits him. He barks at the club-boys and if you drift into the studio you're about as welcome as the measles." "It's not because he's busy," said Garry grimly.
The public hall was empty, dim with the light of a single electric bulb, and still as the chamber of death that lay behind. Never a shadow moved more silently or more swiftly than P. Sybarite, when he had closed the door, up the steps to Peter Kenny's rooms. Hardly a conceivable sound could be more circumspect than that which his knuckles drummed on the panels of Peter's door.
Five minutes later Kenny's corncrib was a mass of flames and Silas had appeared at the end of the field roaring incomprehensible profanity. Kenny, waiting, whistled softly with a defiant air of calm. The corncrib was his. He had a perfect right to burn it. He meant to tell Silas this in a quiet voice, but lost his temper and thundered it instead.
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