“From the first day until the last when he goes to sleep with a daisy quilt over him,” said Kenny stiffly, “an Irishman lives his life to music.”

“Humph!” said the old man, ready for battle, “the music of his own voice, telling lies.”

Reckless, Kenny used his one weapon of composure.  It made the old man cough with fury and propel himself up and down the room in his wheel-chair until, with a feeling of whirling fire in his brain, Kenny wondered if a man could lose his sanity by watching an infuriated lunatic in a wheel-chair narrowly miss everything in his way.

But he made no further effort at rebellion.  Instead he went each night, invincible in his determination not to be outdone.  When by playing on his pity Adam trapped him he smiled and shrugged.  When the old man assailed him with shafts of truth, no matter what the aftermath of communion with himself and his notebook, he accepted it with composure and an air of interest.  When in a fury, Adam reviled him for his phlegm, he laughed and was cursed for his pains.

“You told me, Adam,” he said, “that my greatest drawback is a habit of excitement and temper.  Excitable I shall probably be all my life.  It’s temperamental.  But I’m learning to control my temper.”

In a week his coolness and composure were bearing horrible fruit.

Exhausted by blind fits of rage, racking spells of coughing and more brandy than usual, the invalid’s weakness became pitifully apparent.  He seemed now but a shaking shadow, gray and gaunt.  Even the doctor, who accepted him with fatalistic calm, confessed alarm.  And Kenny, with his teeth set and his fingers clenched in his hair, faced another problem.  He was to blame and he alone!  What in the literal name of mercy was he to do?

There was one alternative left and one only.  Either he must meet the old man’s hunger for battle with a show of temper, the blacker the better, or leave the farm for good.  But even with his thraldom heavy on his soul the prospect of leaving Joan filled him with pain and panic.  There remained then but the show of temper in which Adam would be sure to thrive.

So Kenny set himself to his freak of mercy.  Thereafter, when the need arose, he walked the floor under the piercing battery of Adam’s eyes, blazing forth a fury that, in the circumstances, with his sense of the ridiculous upper-most, could not be real.  He raved and swore when he wanted to collapse in a chair and rock with nervous laughter.

Keen, alert, intensely delighted, Adam began to thrive.  Chuckling he slipped back to his normal state of debility.  Finding in the stress of his victim’s tempestuous surrender that he forgot the megaphone, he perversely began again to have trouble with his ears.

Kenny and his megaphone returned to the fray.

Thus September came, warm and golden.  Haze, soft and indistinct lay in the valley and on the hills.  Summer lingered in the garden but on the ridge the nights were cool and in the swamplands, Hughie said, already the maples were coloring with a hint of colder weather.  Here and there on birch and poplar fluttered a yellowing leaf.