But Joan had understood.  That was the chief essential.  Always Joan was there upon the horizon of his day.  Whatever he thought, whatever he did, was colored by a passionate desire for the girl’s approval.  Her pleasure became his delight; her smile his inspiration.  In that, he told himself, pleased to interpret all things here in the sylvan heart of solitude in the terms of romance and mystery, he was like the chivalrous warrior of old who found his true happiness in gallantly serving a beautiful maid.  Joan was surely such a type as chivalry conceived.  She filled his Celtic ideal and aroused all his gladness as a woman should.  And she was as shy and beautiful as a wild flower and as unspoiled.  He blessed the old gowns that quaintly framed her loveliness anew from day to day.  But they had been his undoing.  He felt that he might have kept his head a little longer but for the blaze of the gold brocade in the last light of the sun.

Laughter made her lovely.  Ah, there Brian had been right.  But then, he reflected sadly, Brian was always right.  That, he could surely concede, when Fate had put an end to his quest and doomed him to linger here in the home of a miser, waiting, waiting, yes, waiting in impatience for word of his son.  Well, perhaps he was not impatient, but at least he was waiting.  And Brian had found in Joan’s face the vigor of sweetness, not the kind that cloys.  Kenny liked the words.

It was inevitable, with songs for everything, that he would have songs, like the tenderer tones of his voice, that he kept for Joan alone, songs that came softly to his lips when Nature stirred his fancy and Joan was at his side in an old-time gown.

A lone pine, a wild geranium, a lark or Joan’s garden where the heliotrope grew; they were sparks to a fire of inspiration that came forth in song.

There was one song he sang most often.

“What is it, Kenny?” Joan asked one sunset when Kenny on the farm porch was finding the subtleties of color for her in the darkening valley below them and the western sky above the hills.

“What’s what, Arbutus, dear?” he asked with guile.

The “dear” didn’t bother her.  It was frequently “Hannah, dear!” and “Hetty, dear!” and Hughie was often “Hughie, darlin’.”

“Why,” asked Joan, “do you call me Arbutus?”

“Because you’re like one,” he said gently.

“And what was the song?”

“‘My Love’s an Arbutus,’” said Kenny demurely.  He knew at once that he must not step so far ahead again.  She looked a little frightened.  Kenny instantly called her attention to a gap in the range of hills to the west.

“Like the Devil’s Bit in Ireland,” he said.  “There the devil, poor lad, bit a chunk out of a mountain and not liking the morsel over well, treated it as you and I would treat a cherry pit.”

Joan laughed.

“True.” said Kenny, “every word of it.  I myself have seen the chunk he threw away.  Tis the Rock of Cashel.  He’s been bitin’ again over there, I take it.  To-morrow you and I will go down into the valley, seek the unappetizin’ rock he rejected and look it over.”