n not be!"

"It can and is," said Garry pushing away the book.

"Adams still owes me five thousand dollars for his wife's portrait,"
sputtered Kenny.

"And now he's out of town."

"What on earth did you do with Reynolds' last check? You had enough
there to live a year."

Kenny looked dazed.

"I recognized the danger with Brian's commercial instinct gone," he
stammered, "and--and conserved my funds."

"You must have. You bought a lot of clothes," reminded Garry. "And
paid some bills."

"Some," admitted Kenny.

"Enough," commented Garry, "to establish, I suppose, one of your
startling flurries of credit."

Kenny had meant to pay more. But the bank had put an end to that
to-day by intruding into his private affairs. He'd even meant to
redeem Brian's shotgun and anything else he'd pawned.

"Lucky for Brian," put in Garry, "that you've mesmerized Simon into
holding things indefinitely even when you don't pay the interest. And
of course you blew in a good part of the check on something foolish."

Kenny said with dignity that he'd bought a rug, nothing foolish. It
hung over there. An exquisite thing, sensuous and soft! Color and
form enough to drive a man mad with delight. He'd dreamt of the thing
for days before he bought it. Indeed he'd meant not to buy it but
something had snapped in his brain when he looked at it. Look at the
design. Never once did it tire the eye, free-flowing and sure. Its
intricate simplicity was amazing.

"And you paid a small fortune for it," said Garry. "Don't sputter.
The voucher's here."

Kenny sulked. Finding that Garry still had a tendency to finger
disconcerting checks and jot figures on a pad, he reached for his hat
and went out.

"I'm going to do some illustrating for Graham," he telephoned a little
later, "if I do it quick. I'm with him now. I presume it's etiquette
to do something financial when you're overdrawn. Brian always watched
the bank to see that they put nothing over on me."

He disappeared from human ken for several days. Garry, sniffing the
odor of coffee and cigarettes in the corridor outside his door,
pictured his horrible concentration.

"It's that hazy autumn sort of weather that gets me," he telephoned
nervously one morning. "I don't want to work and I've got to finish
this stuff for Graham to-day. He'll pay at once if I do. Garry, I'm
going to lock the studio door and throw the key over the transom to
you. Don't let me out, no