rt.

"I meant them," he said with a sigh, "for costume dances, but Aranyi
paints the texture of things with marvelous skill."

By the end of the month Joan's work day was full and he was seeing her
less than he had, save at night. Garry begged her to pose for him,
carried his case to Kenny and met with blank refusal.

"I'm sorry, old man," Kenny finished inexorably, "but nothing under
forty need apply. You, my son, are particularly flighty and fickle.
Just now you happen to be raving about Peggy, but every pretty face,
I've noticed, makes you forget the one before."

And Garry, who had been trying to marry Peggy for a year and was by no
means as uncertain and mercurial in his affections as Kenny would have
him believe, stared with eyes intelligent and reminiscent.

"Well," he said softly, "I'll be jiggered. That's the limit!"

"Be jiggered!" Kenny told him shortly. "And have done with it."

Garry raised his eyebrows and departed. And Kenny, reverting to one of
his old frantic minutes, walked the floor. He had accepted portrait
commissions that would keep him busy for months; for the ragged money
he had hidden in the fireplace had made his need of work imperative.
Otherwise he himself could have painted Joan in the gold brocade and in
all the others.

What had the money in the fireplace done for him? It had doomed him to
work apart while other men painted the golden shadows in her hair.

CHAPTER XXXI

FATE STABS

March came to Kenny and found his studio with its haunting odor of
coffee and cigarettes, his brushes, his head and his heart, furiously
at work. He was giving himself up to love and labor with a Celtic
intensity that Garry found appalling. He planned endlessly to one
purpose: Joan's happiness, Joan's pleasure, Joan's future with him.
The memory of the ragged money laid aside for Don he dismissed with a
wry smile, gritting his teeth. What mattered in the face of the
splendid fact that he was so joyously, so recklessly, so absurdly happy?

His life, with its deadly singleness of purpose, should have been
simple. It attained a complexity at times at which he marveled. An
inclination to blurt out the truth with panicky abruptness when he
wanted to lie, plunged him into more than one predicament.

"I'm always explaining to somebody," he complained bitterly to Garry,
"why I tell the truth--"

"You told Kenneth his dancing urchin was rotten--"

"It was," insisted Kenny. "Garry, why