arry, haunted him, Brian's lazy authoritative
guardianship and the comparative order to which he could reduce
existence when he chose were indispensable to his daily comfort.

Ah! unbelievably care-free--those old devil-may-care days when Brian
had been content to work and laugh and quarrel! Kenny, looking back
with longing, likened his plight to that of Ossian returning after
three hundred years of fairy bliss from the fabled delights of
Tirnanoge. Touched earth he had, in spite of warning, and become on
the minute a wrinkled, old, old man. So with Kenny. He had touched
earth, he reflected tragically. Never again would his fairyland be
quite the same. Man talked of his flaws. His fallibility they said
was monumental. There was Adam who had morbidly incited him to a
notebook, a damnable, pervasive notebook which he tried in vain to
ignore. There was Whitaker, to whom, at a loose end, he wrote a great
many letters of rebuke, some stately, some less so. There was Brian,
whose absence had revolutionized his pleasant way of life; and Garry
and Jan and Sid, who at any cost merely wanted him to work. Grievance
enough for any man who resented the disturbance of unneeded change.

The truth of it was, he owned at times, he was homesick for Joan and
fed his loneliness with letters he felt himself obliged to write. That
was inevitable, for he had fled from an idyl and the memory of its
charm must lessen slowly. Often with an eye upon the clock he found
himself picturing the routine of the farm and longing for its freedom
from the petty need of work.

He blew the horn beneath the willow and watched Joan cross the river in
the punt. He climbed the garret stairway and helped her pick a gown.
He watched the Gray Man steal along the ridge, lingering in boxwood
paths and in the orchard. And then with night among the pines and the
plaintive voice of autumn wind, Joan was climbing down the vine and
hurrying through the wood to the cabin, and Adam with his eye upon the
brandy was counting wearily when the clock struck. How the wind would
rattle at his windows! How the log would flare! How Adam must be
longing for excitement! And how glad he was that he himself had found
a safe hiding place in a lonely tree-stump for the lantern Joan had
reluctantly agreed to carry since the fall closed in.

Um . . . Joan would be building a fire in the cabin now and drawing
the shades and Mr. Abbott would be picking his way through t