“I’ll be damned if I go!” he bristled.  “I’m too busy.”

Garry looked directly at him and compelled a slight faltering of his gaze.

“It’s the one day I’ve felt like work,” blustered Kenny, squaring off his canvas.  “You spoke of work, didn’t you?  And a fool of an English squire who ate goose?  Let the idle rich sit around in squads and swear they don’t read the newspapers.  I do.  Me on a jury!  My dear Garry!  I can’t even sit still in my own studio.  You know that yourself.”

Nevertheless after a heated argument he went wearily with Garry in a taxi, particularly individualistic in his attire.  And he told the judge in a richer brogue than usual that he was a painter subject to irresistible fits of dreaminess and must be excused.  Garry, aghast, stared at the judge and the judge, with peculiar interest stared at the delinquent and excused him.

“Fortunately,” Garry told him later, “your civic duties haven’t spoiled your day.”

Kenny merely glanced at him with a gentle air of patience.  He would like to remind Garry that he had wanted to work and, thanks to Brian, the law had intervened.  Now the coffee would be cold and he hated the sight of cold coffee.  It depressed him.

Things thickened alarmingly.  At three that afternoon, when he answered a violent thump upon the wall, Garry found the Louis XV table in a cloud of smoke; it was littered with vouchers and check books.  Kenny, with his teeth set and one hand clenched in his hair, was figuring with the speed of an expert without, Garry felt sure, an expert’s results.  Brian, Kenny said aggrievedly, had always kept his check book straight.

“Look!” he flung out, indicating a problematical balance.  “Look at that!  And the fool says I’m overdrawn.”

“What particular fool?”

“Some clod of a mathematician,” explained Kenny with contempt, “whom the bank employs to insult its patrons.  Look here, Garry!  Look at that balance.  Over a thousand dollars.  Do you wonder I told him he had a sense of humor when he said I was overdrawn?  The young popinjay!  Arguing with me about my own balance!”

“How did it end?”

“I told him,” said Kenny formally, “that the bank would most likely demand his resignation in a few days.  And when he began to grow mathematical and persistent, I hung up.”

Garry patiently sorted the vouchers and balanced the check book while Kenny in frenzied consideration of a new complication roved around the studio and smoked.  He was a God-fearing Irishman.  He wanted peace.  But if ever a man’s destiny knew unheard-of complication!  Well, all of it could be traced to Brian’s unscrupulous flight.  He must come back.  Kenny felt that his career was menaced.  Life in the studio had become intolerable.  He had been embroiled in two scandals, thanks to Brian’s bouillon cups and Brian’s unscrupulous shirking of numismatic responsibility.  Everybody was talking about him; he had Garry’s word for it.  He couldn’t work.  When he could he was summoned for jury duty.  His accounts, like the studio, were in a mess and he’d overdrawn.  If something didn’t happen soon—­