The final sentence startled him most of all.

Again he read it all and the memory of Brian, white, aggressive, desperately intent upon escape, came between him and his quest of self-content.  It always bothered him.  It had driven him to hunt the psaltery stick, repent his lie to Garry and water the fern.  It had driven him out upon the road.  Mocking voices rose now from the depths.  Was it—­could it all be true?  The shock of the thought was cataclysmic and he longed for the self-respect and confidence in which he had basked that night in Hannah’s kitchen.  Must the world side with Brian?  He was sorry about the shotgun.  He was sorry about the sunsets.  By the Blessed Bell of Clare, he was willing to be sorry about anything, little as he felt himself to blame.  Was he to blame?  Had he not paid for it all in his days of stormy penance?

Out of his white-hot revolt clear vision came to him, as it sometimes did, with incomprehensible, dart-like swiftness, and leveled him to the dust.  Some of it he would not face but he saw his days upon the road with truth and shame.  He had failed in his penance.  Garry was right.  He did everything by fits and starts.  And he could justify whatever was most conducive to his comfort and his inclination.  His pilgrimage had been farcical.  He had fled from discomfort, magnifying pettiness into tragedy.  And he had been disloyal to the son he loved.  For there under the willow when his startled eyes had found Joan, he had passionately made up his mind to linger.  Nay more, even then in the dim recesses of his mind, he had hoped there would be no clue to send him forth again in quest of Brian.  And if there had been, Kenny faced the fact that he would not have gone. . . .  No, he would not have gone. . . .  And Adam Craig was a vulture preying upon the unrest in his heart that he had hoped to stifle.

He went downstairs with a shudder, craving stars and darkness, unbolted the front door and went out upon the porch.

The valley was black.  Its lonely points of light vanished early.  Up here on the ridge there was wind and quiet.  He peopled the gulf of blackness ahead with things sinister and evil in spirit like Adam Craig and turned his back upon it with a shiver.  There would be peace in the voice of the river.

The starlight, dim and soft, had a sense of silver in its indistinctness.  To Kenny, walking through the orchard, ghosts of blossoms blew fragrantly above his head.  The blossoms were gone like his peace of mind.  He hungered for Joan.

In the velvet dimness the wistaria vine beneath her window loomed forth like a shower of shadow; a grotesque ladder of bloom warm to his mind with invisible color and yet darker to his eye than the night with its silver sheen of stars.

A ladder?  Kenny caught his breath and stood still, quite still.  It was a ladder.  Some one was climbing down.  Branch after branch the climber touched with unerring instinct and ran off noiselessly through the orchard to the south.