“Whitaker,” flung out Kenny indignantly, “Brian plays but one instrument in this studio and we have a dozen.  Wasn’t it precisely like him to pick out that damned psaltery there with the crooked stick?  I mean—­wasn’t it like him to pick out something with a fiendish appendage that could be lost, and keep the studio in an uproar when he wanted to play it?”

Whitaker laughed in spite of himself.  The psaltery stick was famous.

Moreover, Brian—­Brian, mind you, who talked of truth with hair-splitting piety—­Brian had that very day at noon forced his father to the telling of a lie.

“But he wasn’t here,” said Whitaker, mystified.  “He lunched with me.”

“The fact remains,” insisted Kenny with dignity.  “I myself told Garry Rittenhouse he’d gone up to Reynolds to collect some money.  And Garry, thinking he had come back, believed it.”

“Kenny,” said Whitaker, his patience quite gone, “are you mad?  How on earth did Brian force you into that lie?”

“By not coming home,” said Kenny sulkily.  “If he’d come home as a lad should, I needn’t have told it.  You can see that for yourself.”

Whitaker dazedly threw up his hands.

Having successfully baffled his opponent with the brilliancy of his unreason, Kenny enlarged upon the humiliation he must experience when Garry learned the truth.  At a familiar climax of self-glorification, in which Kenny claimed he had saved Brian from no end of club-gossip by his timely evasion of the truth, Whitaker lost his temper and went home.

He left his host in a dangerous mood of quiet.

It was a quiet unlike Kenny, who hated to think, and presently he flung his pipe across the studio, fuming at what seemed to him unprecedented disorder.  It was getting on his nerves.  No man could work in such a hodge-podge.  Even inspiration was likely to be chaotic and futuristic.  Small blame to Brian if he resented it all.  To-morrow, if Reynolds deigned to appear with his check, he would summon Mrs. Haggerty, and the studio should have a cleaning that the mercenary old beldame would remember.  Kenny vaguely coupled Mrs. Haggerty with the present disorder and resented both, his defiant eyes lingering with new interest upon a jumble of musical instruments in a corner.

With a muffled objurgation he fell upon the jumble and began to overhaul it.  The object sought defied his fevered efforts to unearth it and with teeth set, he ransacked the studio, resentfully flinging a melee of hindrances right and left.

The telephone rang.

“Kenny,” said Garry’s patient voice, “what in Heaven’s name are you doing?  What hit the wall?”

“I’m hunting the stick to that damned psaltery,” snapped Kenny and banged the receiver into the hook, one hand as usual clenched frenziedly in his hair.

Later, with the studio a record of earthquake, he found it under a model stand and wiping his forehead anchored it to the psaltery for good and all with a shoestring.