He drifted dangerously after a while into the tenderness and passion of the Liebestraume, the one thing perhaps that, loving, he knew to the end; swept through the downward cadenza with exquisite accuracy and feeling, and forgot the rest.  With the girl’s soft pensive eyes upon him he could have forgotten anything; he even forgot that love is transient.

“Joan!” he gasped.

A loud voice rasped through the silence.

“Kenny!”

Joan shivered.  Kenny stared at her in terror.  It was the voice of Adam Craig.

“Kenny!” The voice, sharp with indignation, brought them both to their feet.

“Yes?” stammered Kenny, his face scarlet.

“Do you know all of anything?”

Lamp in hand Kenny went to the foot of the stairway.

“Adam,” he demanded, staring up aghast at the wheel-chair and the wrinkled, saturnine face bending over the railing with a leer of triumph, “how in God’s name did you get there?”

“Wheeled myself, you Irish fool!” snapped Adam.

Kenny went wearily up the stairway and set the lamp in a corner of the hallway.

“Well,” bristled the old man.  “Why don’t you say something?  What are you going to do about it?”

“It’s the kind of night,” said Kenny, “that you always have a fire.  I’m going to wheel you back where it’s safe and warm.”

Adam chuckled.

“That’s what I thought you’d do,” he jeered.

“And then?”

“Then,” thundered Kenny in a blaze of temper, “I’m going back!”

As usual his show of temper filled the invalid with delight.

“Humph!” said he.  “So am I.”

Kenny stopped the chair with a jerk.

“What do you mean by that?” he demanded.

“I mean,” said Adam Craig, “that I’ll wheel my chair back where I can listen to music instead of rain.  And if you wheel me back I’ll do it again.  The hallway’s dark and it’s full of turns but I’ll manage somehow, if I break my neck.”

There was danger at every turn.  A cold sweat came out on Kenny’s forehead.

“Adam,” he said quietly, “how did you manage to get there in the first place?  How did you open the door of your room?”

“Wheeled myself close to the knob and unlatched it—­”

“Yes?”

“Then I wheeled myself out of the way and poked at the door with a stick.”

“Stick!  What stick?”

“A stick out of a shade.  Do you think I’m a fool?”

Kenny groaned.

“After that,” purred the old man with a hint of pride, “until I got into the dark hallway and began to bump, it was easy.”

The sitting room door was still open.  Kenny wheeled his exasperating old man of the sea over the sill in a terror of foreboding.

Adam stared at him.

“Where in the name of Heaven,” he said, “did you get that rig?  You look like an actor.”