had the words failed to thrill him with the romance of the
road. Now as the rainy twilight threatened with never an inn in sight,
he lingered on the final lines: "The music of my own sad steps!"

Sad steps indeed that postponed his meeting with Brian! Did he not owe
it to his son to travel with all possible speed to the farmhouse
instead of plodding belatedly along the highway in rain and gloom and
twilight? Had he after all a right to indulge his passion for tramping
and footsore penance when already word might have come to the sister
with the ink-pool eyes? The runaway was young. His remorse would come
the quicker. For every day he, Kenny, lingered in selfish penance on
the road, he must pay in a widening of distance between Brian and
himself. Kenny quickened his sagging foot-steps. Drenched and hungry,
he felt himself better able to see the thing in sane and unpoetic light.

It came to this: Would Brian prefer the rags of romantic loitering to
the speed, train or otherwise, of eager affection? Surely not! He
must not be selfish. Foot-sore or foot-fresh, his remorse would be the
same. With Brian it would be the inner things that counted.

At twilight Kenny found a thrifty farmer who agreed to take him in. He
dried his clothes by the kitchen fire, hating the woolly smell of the
steam. Later he slept in the haymow and lay awake far into the night,
listening in doubt and despair to the drip of the rain on the roof.
Nothing ever went quite right. He must read again in Brian's letter
about the Tavern of Stars. Beldame Rain seemed bent upon a
housecleaning. Kenny, dreaming, departed from the barn in a flying
machine made of lilacs. Its planes, he regretted, seemed merely sheets
of rain, specked foolishly with pine-needles.

He awoke to a subdued noise of voices in the barn below and wondered
disapprovingly if the farmer was just getting home. It appeared that
he was getting up. Horribly depressed and sorry for him, Kenny went to
sleep again. When he awoke the sun was laughing iridescently from
meadow trails of rain. The fragrance of wet pine came in through the
barn window. The lilac in the garden was ready to flower. Kenny
longed to be off. Nevertheless he breakfasted at some length in the
farm kitchen and paid so handsomely in coin and grace that there was
talk of him for days.

Already the sun was warm. It lay in a blanket of bright gold
everywhere. Cloud shadows deepened a meadow here and