s went downstairs. The lamp in the parlor
was already lighted; soft yellow shadows lay upon the faded walls; dust
and cobwebs had long ago surrendered to the siege of Hannah's broom.
Kenny drew the curtains to close out the splash of rain upon the window
panes and went to the piano. Even the noise of wind and rain left him
calm and cold and invincible. He played brilliantly snatches of
everything he knew. When Joan came and curled up in a chair beside him
with her chin upon her hand, he forgot Adam Craig entirely and went on
playing. Not the music of rebellion; it was more the music of dreams,
dusk-moths of melody that flitted through his memory, curiously
iridescent.

He drifted dangerously after a while into the tenderness and passion of
the _Liebestraume_, the one thing perhaps that, loving, he knew to the
end; swept through the downward cadenza with exquisite accuracy and
feeling, and forgot the rest. With the girl's soft pensive eyes upon
him he could have forgotten anything; he even forgot that love is
transient.

"Joan!" he gasped.

A loud voice rasped through the silence.

"Kenny!"

Joan shivered. Kenny stared at her in terror. It was the voice of
Adam Craig.

"Kenny!" The voice, sharp with indignation, brought them both to their
feet.

"Yes?" stammered Kenny, his face scarlet.

"Do you know _all_ of anything?"

Lamp in hand Kenny went to the foot of the stairway.

"Adam," he demanded, staring up aghast at the wheel-chair and the
wrinkled, saturnine face bending over the railing with a leer of
triumph, "how in God's name did you get there?"

"Wheeled myself, you Irish fool!" snapped Adam.

Kenny went wearily up the stairway and set the lamp in a corner of the
hallway.

"Well," bristled the old man. "Why don't you say something? What are
you going to do about it?"

"It's the kind of night," said Kenny, "that you always have a fire.
I'm going to wheel you back where it's safe and warm."

Adam chuckled.

"That's what I thought you'd do," he jeered.

"And then?"

"Then," thundered Kenny in a blaze of temper, "I'm going back!"

As usual his show of temper filled the invalid with delight.

"Humph!" said he. "So am I."

Kenny stopped the chair with a jerk.

"What do you mean by that?" he demanded.

"I mean," said Adam Craig, "that I'll wheel my chair back where I can
listen to music instead of rain. And if you wheel me back I'll do it
again. The hallway's dark and it's ful