ender, wasted fingers upon the arm of his
chair.

"What was it?" he asked guilelessly.

"As I remember it," stammered Kenny in surprise, "you were good enough
to say that I might stay here as long as I chose."

"Like all women and some Irishmen," said Adam Craig, "she lied. I said
you could stay as long as you were willing to pay."

Kenny changed color. The invalid chose to misinterpret his interval of
constraint.

"So," he said softly, "you don't always pay!"

The random shot of inference went home. It was the first of many.
Kenny fought back his temper. Affronted, he crossed the room and laid
a roll of bills upon the table. Craig counted them with an irritating
show of care.

"That, Mr. O'Neill," he said, "will guarantee my hospitality for the
space of a month!"

He put the roll of money in the pocket of his bathrobe and Kenny
fancied his fingers loathe to leave it.

The drip of the rain and the gusty noise of wind that by daylight had
been no more than a melancholy adjunct to the poetry of wet blossoms,
became suddenly sinister and tragic and irresistibly atmospheric.
Kenny stared with new vision at the dreadful old man in the bathrobe.
One by one Kenny was fated to solve his mysteries when he wanted to
keep them. He knew now in a flare of intuition why the old rooms had
been abandoned, why Joan ferried folk from the village in the valley to
the village across the river, why her gown of the morning and the rags
of the runaway had been pitifully patched and mended. And he
remembered the mystery of her color, when, questing an inn, he had
glanced at the house on the cliff and hinted that her uncle might
consent to be his host.

"I know he would!" Joan's low voice rang in his ears again with new
meaning.

Adam Craig was a miser.

He shrank at the thought. Annoyed to find the old man's eyes boring
into him again, he cleared his throat and looked away.

"So," said Adam Craig, "you are a famous painter!"

"I am a painter," said Kenny stiffly.

"With medals," purred Adam.

"With medals."

A fit of coughing seemed for an interval to threaten the old man's very
life.

"Yonder in the closet," he said huskily, "is a bottle and some glasses.
Bring them here."

Kenny obeyed.

"Sit down."

With the old man's eyes upon him, hungry and expectant, as if he
clutched at the thought of companionship, Kenny reluctantly found a
chair for himself and sat down. Pity made him gentle. Year in and
yea