“It’s not because he’s busy,” said Garry grimly.  “Nothing I’ve found is further from his mind than the thought of work.”

“And it’s plain Brian isn’t coming back,” put in Jan.  “He might as well face that fact and have done with it.  Personally I’ve lost patience with him.  He acts like a sulky kid.”

Later Jan improvised a “scarlet fever” placard which Kenny in the course of time found nailed upon his door.  He read with amazed and offended eyes that he was temporarily in temper quarantine.

It soon became apparent that life without Brian was maintaining even more than its usual average of petty complication.  The problem of small change Kenny found a torment.  There Brian had been a jewel.  It simply narrowed down to this, he told Garry:  No matter how he started, he never had any.  Even a bag of change he had procured from the bank in a moment of desperation was never to be found.  It got under things.  His eventual solution of the difficulty plunged the club into scandal and uproar.  He found the bag of change and sprinkled coins into everything in the studio that would hold them.

“Now,” he informed Garry with moody satisfaction, “I’ll always be able to put my hand on some when I want it.  I wonder I didn’t think of it before.  I’m better with big sums.  Dimes and nickels and even quarters make me nervous.  You know how it is, Garry.  I always have to come in to you or do one of a number of desperate things.  And then if I can’t find a small coin and tip with a big one, Jan gets wind of it somehow and talks by the hour about demoralizing the club-boys.  He’s a pest.”

The device at first bade fair to be successful.  Later there was frenzied recourse to Garry to help him remember where on earth the dimes were likely to be.  Later still the pages helped.  The sequel came quickly.  The studio attained suspicious popularity with one or two new untried boys who mined the studio in Kenny’s absence and tipped themselves.  Kenny, as scandalized as only Kenny could be, turned sleuth and reported the thing in wrath.  Everybody missed something and the club buzzed with scandal until the boys departed, likely, Kenny thought bitterly, to retire for life on the dimes and nickels they had dug out of his studio.

Why must he always be the central pivot of a whirlpool of excitement?  God knows he loved peace even if Fate never permitted him to sample it.  He laid the whole thing unconditionally at Brian’s door.  Let Brian, instead of shirking his usual numismatic responsibilities in some indefinite green world of peace and calm, come home as he should.