On the whole he was much too happy to be lonely or introspective.  Brian’s absence and his splendid, sacrificial freak of service, had been the price of Joan’s content and the welfare of her brother.

Whitaker, journalism and God’s green world of spring he had chosen jealously to resent.  The thought of Donald West and a dim conviction of quarry hardships filled him with a new sense of solidarity in Brian and a passionate respect.  The current of his affection for his son was subtly altering.  It was no longer careless and frenzied and sentimental.  Nor was it selfish.  Something big and abiding had sprung up out of the ashes of his penance.

By the end of March, with a record-breaking period of work behind him and a furore of notoriety over his striking portrait of a famous beauty compelling him to a radiant admission of success, Kenny found himself lulled into the self-respecting quietude he craved.

Days back self-confidence had come to him in Hannah’s kitchen and Adam Craig, in the course of time, had crushed it out with a keen and understanding leer.  Later it had returned with Adam’s death, and the weary voice of Doctor Cole had shattered it.

So now on a March night of wind and hail—­and this time by telephone after much tedious trouble with the wire, Doctor Cole’s voice, tired, sorrowful and kind, came stabbing intrusively into his full-blown equanimity with a message of terror.

“Mr. O’Neill—­”

“Yes.”

“This is Doctor Cole of Briston, Pennsylvania.”

Kenny stiffened.  He had never quite forgiven the doctor for that bleak, anticlimacteric morning when he had driven dazedly away with Nellie.  Adjectives, like a man’s laughter, were to him an irrefutable test.  With one you could definitely prefigure a man’s degree of refinement; with the other the aesthetic color of his soul.  And gray was no color for any mortal’s soul.

“Yes?”

“Mr. O’Neill,” came the kind, tired voice, “I’m sorry, sorrier than I can tell.  I’ve bad news for you.  There has been an accident, a quarry explosion, and your son is badly injured.”

A hot quiver swept through Kenny’s body, ended at his face in a stinging rush of blood and left him icy cold.

“Brian!”

“Yes. . . .  Are you there, Mr. O’Neill?”

“Yes. . . .  Yes, I am here.  Doctor. . . .  How—­badly?”

“He is—­well, conscious.  I can hardly say more,” owned the doctor.  “Thank God he’s young and strong.  There are no developed symptoms of fracture yet but his skull—­”

“Fracture!  Skull!”

“There’s a chance.  Contusion now merely and a swollen condition.  The soft parts are unbroken and that makes an accurate diagnosis difficult, but I must warn you that there is an immediate risk to his life from shock and perhaps compression—­”

“Oh, my God!” said Kenny, his eyes wet.

“You see, Mr. O’Neill,” said the doctor sadly, “there may be depressed fragments of bone or effused blood.  We are watching closely.  But I think you had better come to him at once.  There is a possibility—­”