There were times when the girl’s soft eyes opened wide in a panic of incredulity.  He was a famous painter, this Irishman who had prevailed upon her in a laughing moment to call him Kenny; a famous painter with a personality as vivid as his face.  And yet he chose to linger at her uncle’s farm.  The color, the gayety, the sparkle, he seemed miraculously to infuse into existence, left her breathless and startled.  And he knew not one spot and one land.  He knew many spots, some wild and remote, and many lands.  Joan marveled at the twist of Fate that had brought him to the willow.

His individuality made its own appeal.  But there were subtler forces working to the girl’s surrender.  One, a deep abiding gratitude to him and Brian.  Though she ran down the lane each morning and peered into the letter box at the end for word of Donald, her disappointment now had nothing in it of terror.  Donald, Kenny said, was with an O’Neill.  He could not go wrong.  She accepted the statement, as she had accepted the stage mother, with utter faith and gladness.

And Kenny was kind to her uncle and to her; kind with an infinite delicacy of tact and feeling.  He seemed to understand the instinct for beauty and adornment that sent her roving to her mother’s trunks.  He understood her dreams and her hunger.  He understood the spirit that had led her to make the garret a sort of shrine to be swept and dusted, to be kept apart and precious.  There was another force, subtle and exacting:  the girl’s burgeoning womanhood.  Wistful for homage, she craved his gallant tenderness and wanted always to be with him.  His frank glance of admiration and his boyish smile were always a tribute.  So was his voice, deep, gentle, sonorous as a sweet-toned bell.  Tones of it she knew were kept for her alone.  The knowledge thrilled her.  She did not know why.

By the time the old wistaria vine outside her window shook in the wind with a glory of purple, the over-crowded days were gliding one into the other like a rain of stars.  Most of all, wakeful in the dark of her room, she remembered the hours by the river when Kenny wove for her high, peaked hats of rushes such as he claimed the Irish fairies wore, and told her tales of Ireland with a trick of eloquence that made her laugh and made her cry.  Odd! unlike her uncle he understood tears too.  A tear, he said, was always trailing an Irishman’s smile.  His sympathetic brogue, smooth and soft and instinct with drollery, held for her a never-ending fascination.

And always at the end of the day there was Kenny’s Gray Man of the Twilight stealing up the river all too soon.

Joan was not the only one to whom the sparkle of the irrepressible Irishman’s wit and humor was an energizing boon.  There was Hannah and Hetty; and Hughie, too, though he stoutly denied it.  Life on the Craig farm was no longer dull.