Ah! unbelievably care-free—­those old devil-may-care days when Brian had been content to work and laugh and quarrel!  Kenny, looking back with longing, likened his plight to that of Ossian returning after three hundred years of fairy bliss from the fabled delights of Tirnanoge.  Touched earth he had, in spite of warning, and become on the minute a wrinkled, old, old man.  So with Kenny.  He had touched earth, he reflected tragically.  Never again would his fairyland be quite the same.  Man talked of his flaws.  His fallibility they said was monumental.  There was Adam who had morbidly incited him to a notebook, a damnable, pervasive notebook which he tried in vain to ignore.  There was Whitaker, to whom, at a loose end, he wrote a great many letters of rebuke, some stately, some less so.  There was Brian, whose absence had revolutionized his pleasant way of life; and Garry and Jan and Sid, who at any cost merely wanted him to work.  Grievance enough for any man who resented the disturbance of unneeded change.

The truth of it was, he owned at times, he was homesick for Joan and fed his loneliness with letters he felt himself obliged to write.  That was inevitable, for he had fled from an idyl and the memory of its charm must lessen slowly.  Often with an eye upon the clock he found himself picturing the routine of the farm and longing for its freedom from the petty need of work.

He blew the horn beneath the willow and watched Joan cross the river in the punt.  He climbed the garret stairway and helped her pick a gown.  He watched the Gray Man steal along the ridge, lingering in boxwood paths and in the orchard.  And then with night among the pines and the plaintive voice of autumn wind, Joan was climbing down the vine and hurrying through the wood to the cabin, and Adam with his eye upon the brandy was counting wearily when the clock struck.  How the wind would rattle at his windows!  How the log would flare!  How Adam must be longing for excitement!  And how glad he was that he himself had found a safe hiding place in a lonely tree-stump for the lantern Joan had reluctantly agreed to carry since the fall closed in.

Um . . .  Joan would be building a fire in the cabin now and drawing the shades and Mr. Abbott would be picking his way through the pines with a book beneath his arm.  Kenny glowered some at Mr. Abbott.  An eye for nothing there but duty and even that he saw in a stark and unromantic way.  And he lacked a sense of humor.  He’d proved it in the river.  Joan answered his letters with an adorable primness that filled him with delight.  It reflected Mr. Abbott.  But her letters ended always with the naivete of a child.  They all missed him.

It was pleasant to be missed.

The pleasure was curiously reactive.  Kenny’s irritability grew too marked to be ignored.  Jan and Sid and Garry met and talked him over.

“What’s wrong with him?” demanded Sid, amazed.  “Garry, what is it?  He’s as quarrelsome as a magpie and nothing suits him.  He barks at the club-boys and if you drift into the studio you’re about as welcome as the measles.”