bit wild in
the eye, took my Dinny up to be a gamin. Gay-min. I thought myself he
said a 'gay mon' and Dinny's a bit young; but I found he meant him to
peddle cigarettes about among the tables."

In the quaint old gowns that were delighting the older painters, Joan
glided through the shifting blare and color unaware of the eyes that
watched and liked her. Not so Kenny.

He knew who stared and smiled and he knew who stared too long. He was
inordinately proud of her.

"Kenny, please!" begged Garry. "Let me paint her. I'm going to
California in April and I won't have another chance. I won't be back
until fall."

"My son--" began Kenny wearily. Then he smiled. "Oh, go ahead,
Garry, darlin'. I'll not be mindin' a bit."

And Garry curiously enough caught the tantalizing charm of her
sweetness that had baffled many an older and wiser man.

Shadows had no part in the wonder of Kenny's winter, but an inclination
to forget his quarrel with Brian and his flare of penance, violent and
incomplete--for he had never reached the longed-for grail of his son's
forgiveness--troubled him vaguely. In spasmodic moments of remorse he
read his notebook, tremendously buoyed up by an augmenting
consciousness of evolution. Faint inner voices warned him at times not
to misinterpret his exultant happiness in terms of infallibility and
when they called to him he had his moments of humility and panic.

In one of them he tried to coax the fern back to life; once with an
alarming air of energy and importance, he departed in a taxi and bought
a great many things for Brian's room; once when miraculously the bank
and he agreed for a brief period upon his balance, he succumbed to a
mathematical fit of uplift and conscience, dashed off a bewildering
number of checks and left the overladen slate of his credit unmarked by
even an I.O.U. His brilliant air of calm and satisfaction thereafter
was distinctly noticeable.

On the whole he was much too happy to be lonely or introspective.
Brian's absence and his splendid, sacrificial freak of service, had
been the price of Joan's content and the welfare of her brother.

Whitaker, journalism and God's green world of spring he had chosen
jealously to resent. The thought of Donald West and a dim conviction
of quarry hardships filled him with a new sense of solidarity in Brian
and a passionate respect. The current of his affection for his son was
subtly altering. It was no longer careless and