Kenny struck himself fiercely on the forehead, wondering if the word had pleased and not provoked him.  The possibility shocked him into fresh courage.  He said everything that was on his mind with deadly quietness and an air of fixed purpose.  Then he picked up his megaphone and started for the door.

“Adam,” he said, “I’ve told you the truth, so help me God, in an hour of practice.  Now, you can practice facing facts.”

And he was gone.

He was courageous and persistent, with the thought of Joan always spurring him to further effort.  Night after night he played his game of truth and fought with desperation for the happiness of the girl whose eyes had committed him irrevocably to a vow of honesty and fact.

He could not see that he was making any headway.

Adam listened with baffling intentness while his strange guest practiced strangely the telling of truth.  He refuted nothing.  He accepted everything that Kenny said with a corroborative, birdlike nod of politeness.  With the megaphone upon the floor by Kenny’s chair, he made no further pretense of deafness.  He said nothing at all and Kenny found his new inscrutable trick of silence unendurable.  One singular fact loomed out above all others.  Adam shamelessly accepted the word miser with a gloating chuckle.  He seemed to like it.  For Kenny, generous to a fault and prodigal with money, the word embodied all things hideous.

There were times when Kenny abandoned the hopeless battle and came at Adam’s plea, reserved and sullen.  Then with a solicitous air of virtue the old man urged him to renew it.

“Kenny,” he demanded more than once, “have you got your practicing done?  You lack application.  If you’re ever to learn truth at your stage of ignorance you’ll have to have it.”

The goad went home.  He did lack application.  And Joan must not suffer from that lack.

But in the end the old man tired him out; and the practice of truth became a boomerang.

Adam Craig smoothly demanded reciprocal privileges.  Once more he told Kenny the truth about himself and drove the tormented Irishman again and again to his notebook.  It had for him a morbid fascination.  No matter how resolute the disdain with which he began to read it, he finished with his color high and his eyes incredulous and indignant.  The barbs failed to lose their sting.  They sank deeper and deeper.  In a terror of defense Kenny returned to the fray with added vim.  But Adam had a deftness with his barbs that his opponent lacked.  Compassion drove the younger man to restraint.  And Adam did not scruple to hide behind the bulwark of his own debility.

Night after night, mutinous at the glaring fact that in this singular battle of truth, Adam Craig was winning, Kenny rushed out into the peace and darkness of the night to seek Joan.  It was inevitable that he should see in the wistaria ladder the means to starlit hours of delight.  It was inevitable that Joan, to whom the vine was no more than an old, familiar stairway, would climb down to him with that shy oblivion of convention that was as much a part of her as her will-of-the-wisp charm.