Garry could have told him it was the way he saw his pictures, romantic in his utter abandon, but Garry was not there and Kenny with his head in the clouds rushed on to his doom.  The punt was a fairy boat sailing him over a silver river to Hy Brazil, the Isle of Delight.  Ah!  Hy Brazil!  You saw it on clear days and it receded when you followed.  It was a melancholy thought and true.  The madness never lasted.

There are those for whom the present is merely anticipation of the future or reminiscence of the past.  Kenny had the supreme gift of living intensely and joyously in the present and the present for him shone in the soft brown eyes of the ferryman in the stern.  Past and future he shrugged to the winds.  For he was sailing across to romance, he hoped, and surely to mystery.  Yes, surely to mystery!  Mystery enough for any Celt in the battered horn, the ferry and the ferryman yonder in the old-time gown.

[Illustration:  He was sailing across to romance, he hoped, and surely to mystery.]

“It was down there,” said Joan, nodding, “where the river bends, that Brian had his camp.”

Brian’s name was a shock.  Kenny came to earth for an instant.  Only for an instant.  The monochrome of gold behind the gables was drifting into color.  Here between the wooded heights where the river ran, already there was shadow.  Twilight and afterglow!  Kenny in poetic vein told of the Gray Man of the Path.  The Path was in Ireland, a fissure in the cliff at Fairhead.  If you climbed well you could use the Gray Man’s Path and scale the cliff.  Kenny himself had climbed it.  Joan, busy with the single oar, lost nevertheless no single word of it.  She was eager and intent.

“I suppose,” said Kenny, “that the Gray Man is the spirit of the mists of Benmore.  But to me he’s always Twilight.  Twilight anywhere.”

The girl nodded, quick to catch his mood.

“And to-night,” she said, “his path is the river.  He’s coming now.”

Kenny’s Gray Man of the Twilight was stealing closer when they landed.

With the feeling of dreams still upon him he followed the girl up the path.  It wound steeply upward among the trees, with here and there a rude step fashioned of a boulder, and came out in an orchard on a hill.

Kenny stood stock-still.  Fate, he told himself, needed nothing further for his utter undoing.  And if she did, it lay here in the orchard.  He had come in blossom time.

Well, thanks to the crowded fullness of his emotional life, he knew precisely what it meant.  He had adventured in blossoms before to the torment of his heart and head.  In Spain.  He had forgotten the girl’s name but it began with an “I.”  Now in the dusk he faced gnarled and glimmering boughs of fleece.  The wind, fitful and chill since the sunset, speckled the grayness beneath the trees with dim white fragrant rain and stirred the drift of petals on the ground.  Stillness and blossoms and the disillusion of intrusive fact!