adder of icy vine? And Adam Craig?

He could not, would not go! And where in the name of all lunatics was
Brian? Life in the studio without him would be impossible. What did
he intend to do? Could he, Kenny, settle down to work with the problem
of his penitential quest for his son still unsettled?

And why in the name of the Sacred Question-mark, was his life a string
of questions!

In the end he fled from Adam's tongue. So he told himself. In reality
panic plunged him into action. His summer was ending. His madness was
not. And for that alarming fact he blamed Brian.

"I was worried," he remembered irritably, "and just in the mood to make
a colossal fool of myself. And I have!"

Otherwise this seizure must have run its course by now. It bothered
him that he had pledged himself to linger at the farm until Joan was
quite herself. Surely the gods of love and honor would understand that
he had foreseen no such troublous dilemma as that which faced him now.
He must take himself in hand. He must find an undisturbing level of
common sense and keep his roving feet upon it. The need was drastic.

"I'll be back in a month," he told Joan, his lips white with compassion
for himself and her, and stared moodily at the blaze of autumn on the
hills, knowing he would not return. "Often I've longed for a winter of
sketching in such a wild and lonely spot."

"And then," said Joan, "when Donald writes you must be here."

"I must be here," said Kenny.

That he felt was the kindest way. Surely, surely it was the kindest.
It saved Joan the painful thought of permanent separation. In a month
without him she would soon forget. A month, he knew of old, worked
wonders. Absence, he had proved again and again, never made a heart
grow fonder. Propinquity was at once a danger and a cure.

Joan waved him down the farm lane, her soft eyes wistful. An adorable
will-of-the-wisp! Almost he could not bring himself to leave her. But
for Hughie's eyes, he would have vaulted from the farm buggy, crying
her name.

"The farm," she had said with frank tears in her eyes, "will be just
like a grave without you."

Kenny knew it would.

The studio he found could match it.

CHAPTER XVI

TANTRUMS

Things went badly from the start. Whitaker for one thing claimed to
have lost track of Brian and Kenny thought he lied. For another, he
could not bring himself to work. A sense in the studio of a presence
gone, he told G