as curious as a woman. His questions, put with the sad,
querulous courtesy of an invalid claiming privileges by reason of his
pain, were sometimes difficult to answer.

"Paul Pry!" murmured Kenny to himself one night.

Adam's sharp eyes snapped.

"Paul Pry, eh?" he quivered. "You impudent devil!"

"A minute ago," reminded Kenny coldly, "when I told you you were
drinking too much brandy, you said you were deaf to-night."

"It's an intermittent affliction," purred Adam with a chuckle. "You
struck me in a minute of vacation."

But the careless sobriquet of Kenny's rankled in the old man's mind and
bore a startling aftermath of fruit.

Kenny was Irish and conversational. He had as usual talked too much,
unaware that Adam, with fiendish insight, was reading steadily between
the lines, ready to pounce.

"Paul Pry!" repeated the old man at intervals. "Paul Pry! You are a
selfish, hair-brained Irishman," he blazed suddenly, leaning forward,
baleful and intense. "Some men feel and some men act. But you act
only when you have to. Life's a battle. Do you fight? No! You glide
along and watch the others. That's the way you've kept your youth.
You never linger on the things that prove unpleasant. You think life
an individual adventure to be lived the way you choose. It isn't.
It's a link in a chain that clanks. You can't escape. You won't
escape. You're a play-actor with a gift for staging yourself and
you're as hungry for the limelight as a circus girl in spangles. What
you need is the hurt of sacrifice. You need to suffer and forget
yourself. Damn you and your brogue and your folk lore. You're the
most amazing liar I've ever met."

But Kenny heard no more. He stumbled out of the sitting room and
slammed the door.

There was a lamp burning in his bedroom. Kenny walked the floor in
anger and humiliation, his fingers clenched as usual in his hair. Back
there in the studio with Whitaker's arraignment ringing in his ears, he
had been conscious of a terror he refused to face, a curious inner
crash of something vital to his peace of mind. And he had fought it
back for days, plunging into the relief of penance with a gasp of hot
content.

Now Adam, sitting in separate judgment, had reached out into the void
and linked himself to Whitaker--to Brian, to Garry--and his barbs
stung. That terror of misgiving, lulled into quietude here in the
peace and charm of his life with Joan, stirred within him hydr