t with the wisdom
of experience the duration of his own enslavement had gone over his
time. And, powers of wild-fire, he still kept going! Something
emotionally was wrong.

It pleased him in a moody moment to busy himself with mathematics, much
as he hated them, and deduce a singular fact. He had spent delicious
hours of many a day with many a maid. But days and days and days with
one? Not ever!

For one hour he had spent with some forgotten object of his adoration
in the past, he had spent five with Joan. The thought alarmed him. It
came to this. If by rational reduction you translated each flare into
hours, the vertigo of his summer with Joan became at once in contrast
equivalent to years. And by every law his infatuation should have
stopped the sooner. How much longer would it linger? What if
Christmas still found him turbulent and upset--and hating the thought
of the studio? This furlough of his from work and worry must come to
an end in time!

Paralyzed by an infinite variety of prospects he stopped dead and
stared at the fading red behind the hills. When had it altered--this
madness of his? Why was it stronger? Any man addicted to falling in
love knew well enough it shouldn't be.

It was his fate to remember as he stood there the talk of love around
the wood-fire. He had barely listened. Yet now his memory cast up
Kreiling's words and took his breath away.

"There is love and love and to be in love is torture and a thing of
self but when the big splendid tenderness comes after the storm of self
and craving, the tenderness that knows more of giving than of
demanding, it comes to stay. But it's not the love of barbarity like
Finn's. It's an evolution."

To stay! . . . The thought was volcanic. . . . _To stay_!

And yet . . . how different that first dizzy sweep of delight at the
sight of Joan's loveliness, from this big, nameless something that
filled his heart with humility and longing! . . . How far away that
day beneath the willow when he had blown the horn! . . . An eternity
lay between.

This love of his--no, it was no longer merely a storm of unrest. It
was no longer merely a delirium of the senses in which he knew
suffering no less than ecstasy. It was a big, kind, selfless
tenderness that grew from day to day. A thing perhaps for eternity!

Kreiling was right.

Kenny's irreverent philosophy of the heart crumbled into ashes at his
feet. Love he had once believed was po