“Again!” echoed Joan a little blankly.

“Again!” said Kenny inexorably.  “You see, Joan, dear, I was used to falling in love.  There are men like that.  You and Brian would never understand.”

“No,” said the girl, shocked.  “No.”

“You made a mistake, the sort of mistake that drives half the lifeboats on the rocks.  I mean, dear, falling in love with love.  But you’re over that.  It was—­a different sort of love with me.  I knew as we crossed the river that first day in the punt that the madness could not last.  You see—­it never had.”

“Kenny!”

If Joan in that moment had remembered the Irishman tearing bricks from the fireplace in a spasm of histrionic zeal, she might have distrusted the steadiness of his level, kindly glance.  She might have guessed that again he was reckless and on his mettle.  But she did not remember.

“Romance and mystery,” said Kenny, lighting a cigarette and smiling at her through a cloud of smoke, “were always the death of me.  My fancy’s wayward and romantic.  Afterward your will-of-the-wisp charm held me oddly.  You kept yourself apart and precious.  And I was always pursuing.  It was provocative—­and unfamiliar.  And then came Samhain, the—­the summer-ending.”  There was an odd note in his voice.  “I faced a new experience.  I had gone over the usual duration of my madness and I thought,” he smiled, “I thought I was loving you for good.  But—­”

Her dark eyes stared at him, wistful and yet in the moment of her hope a shade reproachful.

“And—­your love—­did not last, Kenny?” It was a forlorn little voice, for all its unmistakable note of rejoicing.  How very young she was—­and childlike!

“It—­did—­not—­last!” said Kenny deliberately.  “It never does with me.  I should have known it.  I love you sincerely, girleen.  I always shall.  But I love you as I would have loved—­my daughter.”

“Your daughter!  Kenny, why then did you speak so of the flood of Killarney?”

“I was testing you.  You can see for yourself.  I could not honorably tell you this, dear, if you still cared.”

“But I do care,” cried Joan, flinging out her hands with a gesture of appeal.  “I love you so much, Kenny, that it hurts.”

“But not in the way you love Brian.”

“No.”

“And that, mavourneen, is as it should be.”

He told her of the stage mother.  Let the lie go with the castle he had built upon it.  And he would begin afresh.

“Ah,” said Joan, dismissing it with shining eyes, “there, Kenny, you meant only to be kind.”

He wondered wearily why the lie with all its torment had not shocked her.  Truth was queer.

Joan glided toward the door.  He caught in her face the look of a white flame and dropped his eyes.  A Botticelli look.  Ah, well, it was beautiful to be young and joyous!

“I must tell Brian,” she said.