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Page 50
"No," said Joan gently. "And why should I deny it? For the blue and
silver maid liked the knight."
Kenny's heart leaped to his eyes.
"They wandered on the hills and they wandered in the valley. And then
the maid in blue and silver, who was all rose petals and sun shadows
and the glory of autumn, ran back to the fountain. She had forgotten
to cover it with the stone and the valley was flooded. There beautiful
and calm stretched the lake of Killarney and I hope it was moonlight."
"And the knight and the maid?" Joan had forgotten their game of
pretense. She was eager for the end of the story.
Kenny feathered his oars in silver spray and wondered impatiently why
all love stories ended in an anticlimax. He had finished the story
artistically and well. Luckily Joan had forgotten the stage and the
actors.
"I suppose," he said gloomily, "that the knight married the maid and
took her to dwell in a castle she must have hated. And they lived
unhappily ever after."
Joan laughed. She saw in his words merely a perverse dislike for
familiar endings and forgot it at once. The moonlit lake had aroused
in her a yearning tenderness for the brother off somewhere in what,
Kenny said, Brian called his Tavern of Stars.
"Oh, Kenny," she sighed, "I wish Donald would write!"
The wish jarred. Kenny frowned. How could he wish it too! And yet,
not wishing was disloyal, disloyal to Brian. Upset, he turned, hurt
and sulky. And presently as Joan, busy with thoughts of the truant
brother, continued unaware of the melancholy in his mood that never
failed to make its appeal to her tenderness, he began to hum.
Joan looked up.
"What a queer, wild tune!" she exclaimed. "What is it, Kenny? I've
never heard you sing it before."
"I never felt the need," said Kenny. "It's called the 'Twisting of the
Rope.' Long, long ago, girleen, a harper's gallantry to a pretty maid
angered her mother and she asked him to help her twist a straw rope.
And he did. And twisting he had to back away and over the threshold
and the mother slammed the door in his face. Faith, 'twas all to get
rid of him!"
It was impossible to miss the point. Joan's face went scarlet.
"Oh, Kenny!" she said. "You knew--surely you knew I couldn't mean
that."
It was a new delight to hear her say it.
"When Donald writes," reminded Kenny, "then I must go." And watching
the girl's troubled face, he wondered with a thrill of triumph if at
last the madness of the summer was upon her. Well, thank Heaven, he
was honest and honorable. He would stay until the madness waned.
Always he was fated to climb down out of the clouds first.
Ah! But what if Joan slipped back into sense and sanity first? The
possibility filled him with panic. What on earth would he do?
CHAPTER XV
IN WHICH CALIBAN SCORES
It was a prospect doomed to haunt him more and more as the summer which
had bade fail to be so full of peace, took on an indescribable
atmosphere of complication. Where could he go, he wondered
despairingly, that life would not instantly pour around him a
distracting whirlpool of commotion? Was he fated to rush through life
with his fingers clenched in his hair and his teeth set? Was he
doomed, as Garry had once said, to run forever in circles of excitement?
Stumbling and tired, Kenny tried to keep his feet unswervingly in the
path of truth, colorless and uninviting as it seemed; but the strategy
of his practice hour in Adam's room he was forced to abandon, heartsick
for Joan and the future. His battle for her he knew had been in vain.
Useless further to bombard with truth that silent, inscrutable Caliban
upstairs, whose fiendish power to drive him to his notebook when he
chose in turn to tell the truth, seemed uncanny. And it was practice
enough to tell the truth to Joan! God grant, in all sincerity, that he
might come to justify the faith in the dear eyes of her.
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