f a chain foredoomed to clank. And
he wondered why on earth the old man did not speak.

The suspense became intolerable. Intensely excited, Kenny swung to his
feet.

"Well?" he said.

"Well!" said Adam and smiled a curious, inscrutable, twisted sort of
smile. He had never looked so evil-eyed and subtle. "One of your
greatest drawbacks, Kenny, is an Irish temper and a habit of
excitement."

"A miser!" repeated Kenny with defiance. He must keep his feet upon
the path. It was the prelude to all that he must say for Joan's
emancipation.

"A miser!" said Adam, nodding. "Well, what of it?"

Kenny struck himself fiercely on the forehead, wondering if the word
had pleased and not provoked him. The possibility shocked him into
fresh courage. He said everything that was on his mind with deadly
quietness and an air of fixed purpose. Then he picked up his megaphone
and started for the door.

"Adam," he said, "I've told you the truth, so help me God, in an hour
of practice. Now, you can practice facing facts."

And he was gone.

He was courageous and persistent, with the thought of Joan always
spurring him to further effort. Night after night he played his game
of truth and fought with desperation for the happiness of the girl
whose eyes had committed him irrevocably to a vow of honesty and fact.

He could not see that he was making any headway.

Adam listened with baffling intentness while his strange guest
practiced strangely the telling of truth. He refuted nothing. He
accepted everything that Kenny said with a corroborative, birdlike nod
of politeness. With the megaphone upon the floor by Kenny's chair, he
made no further pretense of deafness. He said nothing at all and Kenny
found his new inscrutable trick of silence unendurable. One singular
fact loomed out above all others. Adam shamelessly accepted the word
miser with a gloating chuckle. He seemed to like it. For Kenny,
generous to a fault and prodigal with money, the word embodied all
things hideous.

There were times when Kenny abandoned the hopeless battle and came at
Adam's plea, reserved and sullen. Then with a solicitous air of virtue
the old man urged him to renew it.

"Kenny," he demanded more than once, "have you got your practicing
done? You lack application. If you're ever to learn truth at your
stage of ignorance you'll have to have it."

The goad went home. He did lack application. And Joan must not suffer
from that l