temper. Excitable I shall probably be all my life.
It's temperamental. But I'm learning to control my temper."

In a week his coolness and composure were bearing horrible fruit.

Exhausted by blind fits of rage, racking spells of coughing and more
brandy than usual, the invalid's weakness became pitifully apparent.
He seemed now but a shaking shadow, gray and gaunt. Even the doctor,
who accepted him with fatalistic calm, confessed alarm. And Kenny,
with his teeth set and his fingers clenched in his hair, faced another
problem. He was to blame and he alone! What in the literal name of
mercy was he to do?

There was one alternative left and one only. Either he must meet the
old man's hunger for battle with a show of temper, the blacker the
better, or leave the farm for good. But even with his thraldom heavy
on his soul the prospect of leaving Joan filled him with pain and
panic. There remained then but the show of temper in which Adam would
be sure to thrive.

So Kenny set himself to his freak of mercy. Thereafter, when the need
arose, he walked the floor under the piercing battery of Adam's eyes,
blazing forth a fury that, in the circumstances, with his sense of the
ridiculous upper-most, could not be real. He raved and swore when he
wanted to collapse in a chair and rock with nervous laughter.

Keen, alert, intensely delighted, Adam began to thrive. Chuckling he
slipped back to his normal state of debility. Finding in the stress of
his victim's tempestuous surrender that he forgot the megaphone, he
perversely began again to have trouble with his ears.

Kenny and his megaphone returned to the fray.

Thus September came, warm and golden. Haze, soft and indistinct lay in
the valley and on the hills. Summer lingered in the garden but on the
ridge the nights were cool and in the swamplands, Hughie said, already
the maples were coloring with a hint of colder weather. Here and there
on birch and poplar fluttered a yellowing leaf.

And Donald had not written.

Kenny, as the days slipped by, faced a new and tragic problem. October
was at hand. Work beckoned with urgent hand. If he did not go soon
somebody would have to balance up his check book for him and tell him
how long he could live without working. Brian, dear lad, had been a
jewel at figures.

But how _could_ he work with the thought of the winter wind and Joan
tormenting him? And the snow-bound cabin in the pines? And the ferry
and the l