o color. Here between the wooded heights where the river ran,
already there was shadow. Twilight and afterglow! Kenny in poetic
vein told of the Gray Man of the Path. The Path was in Ireland, a
fissure in the cliff at Fairhead. If you climbed well you could use
the Gray Man's Path and scale the cliff. Kenny himself had climbed it.
Joan, busy with the single oar, lost nevertheless no single word of it.
She was eager and intent.

"I suppose," said Kenny, "that the Gray Man is the spirit of the mists
of Benmore. But to me he's always Twilight. Twilight anywhere."

The girl nodded, quick to catch his mood.

"And to-night," she said, "his path is the river. He's coming now."

Kenny's Gray Man of the Twilight was stealing closer when they landed.

With the feeling of dreams still upon him he followed the girl up the
path. It wound steeply upward among the trees, with here and there a
rude step fashioned of a boulder, and came out in an orchard on a hill.

Kenny stood stock-still. Fate, he told himself, needed nothing further
for his utter undoing. And if she did, it lay here in the orchard. He
had come in blossom time.

Well, thanks to the crowded fullness of his emotional life, he knew
precisely what it meant. He had adventured in blossoms before to the
torment of his heart and head. In Spain. He had forgotten the girl's
name but it began with an "I." Now in the dusk he faced gnarled and
glimmering boughs of fleece. The wind, fitful and chill since the
sunset, speckled the grayness beneath the trees with dim white fragrant
rain and stirred the drift of petals on the ground. Stillness and
blossoms and the disillusion of intrusive fact!

Joan, lovelier to Kenny's eye than any blossom, seemed unaware of the
romance in the orchard. She was intent upon a man coming down the
orchard hill. Kenny sighed as he turned his eyes from her.

"It's Hughie," she said. "He's watched for you too since the letter
came. We all have. Hughie! Hughie!"

Hughie came toward them, sturdy, middle-aged and unpoetic for all his
head was under blossoms.

"Hughie!" called Joan. "It's Mr. O'Neill. He must have some supper.
Tell Hannah. And I'll go speak to Uncle Adam."

Romance flitted off through the twilight with her. Hungry, Kenny
embarked upon a reactive interval of common sense and followed Hughie,
who seemed inclined to talk of rain, to the kitchen door. It was past
the supper hour. Beyond in a huge, old-fa