“I think most likely,” said Joan, “the farm’s built on it.”

And then the sound of the horn came over the water and Joan ran.

Kenny as usual cursed the horn.

With the valley filled with the first haze of twilight and the hills still aglow, Kenny sat on the farm porch and brooded.  He had not meant to frighten her.  The Arbutus gallantry he had considered strategic and poetic.  There was the baffling thing about her that kept him piqued.  She was always shy and elusive.  Of convention she knew nothing at all; yet like the shrine in the garret she kept herself apart and precious.  Always she seemed fluttering just ahead of him, like a will-of-the-wisp.  If he touched her hand ever so gently she drew it away.  The caresses most girls he had known would have understood and accepted as part of the summer idyl, he knew, instinctively, would be evaded.

Ah! the truth of it was she was an incomprehensible torment of delight.  For she roamed the fields and woods with him gladly, lunched in glens remote it seemed from everything but the call of that infernal horn, yielded to the enthusiasm of his maddest moods, romped with him like a kitten or a child—­and kept miraculously the poise and reticence of a woman.  She talked freely of her brother; never of her uncle.

He was quick and impressionable, this gifted Irishman, with a trace of the melancholy of his race and all of its cheer.  Melancholy was the one mood in which Joan did not seem to flutter just ahead.  Always then she followed, gentle, compassionate and shyly tender.  He was quick to find it out and wily enough to feign it when in reality his heart was as light and buoyant as a feather.

Save for the call of the horn beneath the willow, the girl was as free to come and go as an oriole in the orchard; for that he was grateful.  But whether Adam Craig’s attitude was one of trust or cold indifference, he could not fathom.  With Hughie and Hannah it was different.  They loved Joan and trusted him.  That trust, he resolved, should not be futile.  He could justify it and he would.  Joan, of course, was foredoomed to know the delirium of the heart that had come to him that day beneath the willow.  Fate could not deny him requital.  She never had.  Equally, of course, Joan’s delirium, like his own, would not last.  It could not.  The thought hurt his vanity a little.

It remained for him who had aroused it to linger here at the farm until the fancy had run its course and she was quite herself!  Even if, long before, his own madness had waned.  That was apt to happen, for he was handicapped by an earlier start.  Yes, he would linger.  And he would be scrupulous and honorable and kind.  Joan was young and a woman.  She would nurse the shadows of her summer’s idyl long after the idyl was gone, and would mistake them for reality.  There with his wider experience and the sad memory of much ebb and now he could be helpful.