Brian stubbornly put it all behind him.  Kenny, frantic with tenderness and resolution, could sweep him credulously back into bondage if he kept to the siege.  His promises were fluent always and alluring.  Only by the courage of utter separation could Brian make his longed for emancipation a thing assured.

So he tramped the highway, lingering by fence and rail to talk with men, living and learning.  For the highway meant to him the passion of life.  Hope and sorrow traveled it day and night in homely hearts.

And often his thoughts harked wistfully back to the words of a modern poet which Kenny with his usual skill had set to music: 

  “And often, often I’m longing still,
    This gay and golden weather,
  For my father’s face by an Irish hill,
    And he and I together.”

In the gay and golden weather things were going badly with the unsuccessful parent.  For weeks now his life had been in ferment, his moods as freakish as the wind.  What little regularity his life had known departed to that limbo that had claimed his peace of mind.  That he felt himself abnormally methodic lay entirely in the fact that he watered the fern each day.  It had for him a morbid fascination.  Incomprehensible forces were sapping his faith in himself and the future; and viciously at war with them, he nursed his grievance against Brian only to find that it was less robust than any grievance should be.  At any cost he wanted Brian back.

“He’s taken care of me,” remembered Kenny sadly, “since he was a bit of a lad.”

As ever, the thing withheld, Kenny ardently desired.  That thing was Brian’s presence.  Any Irishman, he decided fiercely, would understand his terrified clinging to the things of the heart that belonged to him by birth.  It was part of his race and creed.  He hated to be alone.  And Brian was all he had.  How lightly he had prized that one possession until it became a thing denied, Kenny, sentimentalizing his need, forgot.

Studio gossip, having concerned itself with Brian’s going, almost to the disruption of the Holbein Club, took up in perturbed detail the glaring problem of Kenny’s tantrums.  He was keeping everyone excited.

“Of course,” mused Garry, “you could earn your living as a moving picture actor—­”

“Adams owes me five thousand dollars for his wife’s portrait,” sputtered Kenny.  “But I can’t get it.  He’s been sick for weeks.  Typhoid.”

“And in the meantime?”

The shaft went home.  Kenny sent for a model—­and sent her home.

“She was too ornamental and decidedly sympathetic,” he explained gloomily to Garry.  “I’m just in the mood to make a colossal fool of myself.  She was the sort of girl you’d invite to tea to meet your brother’s wife.”

“Kenny!”

“She was!” insisted Kenny.

“Any number of models are and you know it.  And that girl is Jan’s cousin.”