frenzied and
sentimental. Nor was it selfish. Something big and abiding had sprung
up out of the ashes of his penance.

By the end of March, with a record-breaking period of work behind him
and a furore of notoriety over his striking portrait of a famous beauty
compelling him to a radiant admission of success, Kenny found himself
lulled into the self-respecting quietude he craved.

Days back self-confidence had come to him in Hannah's kitchen and Adam
Craig, in the course of time, had crushed it out with a keen and
understanding leer. Later it had returned with Adam's death, and the
weary voice of Doctor Cole had shattered it.

So now on a March night of wind and hail--and this time by telephone
after much tedious trouble with the wire, Doctor Cole's voice, tired,
sorrowful and kind, came stabbing intrusively into his full-blown
equanimity with a message of terror.

"Mr. O'Neill--"

"Yes."

"This is Doctor Cole of Briston, Pennsylvania."

Kenny stiffened. He had never quite forgiven the doctor for that
bleak, anticlimacteric morning when he had driven dazedly away with
Nellie. Adjectives, like a man's laughter, were to him an irrefutable
test. With one you could definitely prefigure a man's degree of
refinement; with the other the aesthetic color of his soul. And gray
was no color for any mortal's soul.

"Yes?"

"Mr. O'Neill," came the kind, tired voice, "I'm sorry, sorrier than I
can tell. I've bad news for you. There has been an accident, a quarry
explosion, and your son is badly injured."

A hot quiver swept through Kenny's body, ended at his face in a
stinging rush of blood and left him icy cold.

"Brian!"

"Yes. . . . Are you there, Mr. O'Neill?"

"Yes. . . . Yes, I am here. Doctor. . . . How--badly?"

"He is--well, conscious. I can hardly say more," owned the doctor.
"Thank God he's young and strong. There are no developed symptoms of
fracture yet but his skull--"

"Fracture! Skull!"

"There's a chance. Contusion now merely and a swollen condition. The
soft parts are unbroken and that makes an accurate diagnosis difficult,
but I must warn you that there is an immediate risk to his life from
shock and perhaps compression--"

"Oh, my God!" said Kenny, his eyes wet.

"You see, Mr. O'Neill," said the doctor sadly, "there may be depressed
fragments of bone or effused blood. We are watching closely. But I
think you had better come to him at once. There is a possibility--"