," said Joan clearly, taking from the
chest an exquisite old lavender gown for which she seemed to have come.
"And if your self is bad, the--the where doesn't matter."

Her insight rather startled him. Often afterward he was to find in her
that curious ability to detach herself from custom and tradition, skiff
away the husks of cumulative prejudice and find the kernel of truth for
herself.

Joan went toward the stairs; he followed her with a troubled sigh. The
stage mother bothered him. With her he had bridged a gulf it would
have taken weeks to span, but the trust in Joan's eyes still hurt. If
only he could have begun upon a rock, Brian's rock of fact and not the
shifting sands of his own errant fancy! It would have been a glory to
live up to the faith in the girl's wistful eyes.

He was sorry he had climbed the stairway, sorry he had solved the
mystery of the brocade gown, sorry he had lied, sorry, frenziedly sorry
that whatever new thing slipped into his life, no matter how simple and
beautiful it seemed, took on the familiar complexity fatal to his peace
of mind.

But he was passionately grateful for the tense moment when Joan had
seemed to turn to him for sympathy, a wild and lonely dryad of a girl
in a mended gown.

CHAPTER VII

THE BLOSSOM STORM

At nightfall, with his telegram to Garry depressingly linked with a
memory of winding, sodden, lonely roads, dripping woods and the clink
of milk-cans, Kenny was summoned to the sitting room of Adam Craig.

A fire burned in the open fireplace. Lamp-light softened the
shabbiness of the old room and shone pleasantly on dark wood and a
great many faded books. Later Kenny knew that every book in the
farmhouse was here upon his shelves. Adam Craig sat huddled in a
wheelchair. Kenny thought of the runaway who hated him. He thought of
Joan. He thought of the bleak old rooms that seemed one in spirit with
the man before him. A wrinkled, evil old man, he told himself with a
shudder, with piercing eyes and a face Italian in its subtlety.

Adam Craig looked steadily at the Irishman in the doorway and found his
stare returned. The gaze of neither faltered. So began what Kenny,
when his singular relations with the old man had goaded him to startled
appraisal, was pleased to call a "friendship that was never a
friendship and a feud that was never a feud."

"I sent you a message," said Adam Craig.

"Your niece brought it."

The old man tapped with sl