“Shut up!” said Garry.  “How on earth do you suppose that I can work with you talking all over the studio?  Here are three pages of checks when you were evidently hitting the high spots, that you’ve failed to subtract.  Three on a page.  That makes your balance overdrawn.”

Kenny struck an attitude of acute despair.  “God of my fathers!” he groaned, changing color.  “It can’t be.  Garry, it simply can not be!”

“It can and is,” said Garry pushing away the book.

“Adams still owes me five thousand dollars for his wife’s portrait,” sputtered Kenny.

“And now he’s out of town.”

“What on earth did you do with Reynolds’ last check?  You had enough there to live a year.”

Kenny looked dazed.

“I recognized the danger with Brian’s commercial instinct gone,” he stammered, “and—­and conserved my funds.”

“You must have.  You bought a lot of clothes,” reminded Garry.  “And paid some bills.”

“Some,” admitted Kenny.

“Enough,” commented Garry, “to establish, I suppose, one of your startling flurries of credit.”

Kenny had meant to pay more.  But the bank had put an end to that to-day by intruding into his private affairs.  He’d even meant to redeem Brian’s shotgun and anything else he’d pawned.

“Lucky for Brian,” put in Garry, “that you’ve mesmerized Simon into holding things indefinitely even when you don’t pay the interest.  And of course you blew in a good part of the check on something foolish.”

Kenny said with dignity that he’d bought a rug, nothing foolish.  It hung over there.  An exquisite thing, sensuous and soft!  Color and form enough to drive a man mad with delight.  He’d dreamt of the thing for days before he bought it.  Indeed he’d meant not to buy it but something had snapped in his brain when he looked at it.  Look at the design.  Never once did it tire the eye, free-flowing and sure.  Its intricate simplicity was amazing.

“And you paid a small fortune for it,” said Garry.  “Don’t sputter.  The voucher’s here.”

Kenny sulked.  Finding that Garry still had a tendency to finger disconcerting checks and jot figures on a pad, he reached for his hat and went out.

“I’m going to do some illustrating for Graham,” he telephoned a little later, “if I do it quick.  I’m with him now.  I presume it’s etiquette to do something financial when you’re overdrawn.  Brian always watched the bank to see that they put nothing over on me.”

He disappeared from human ken for several days.  Garry, sniffing the odor of coffee and cigarettes in the corridor outside his door, pictured his horrible concentration.

“It’s that hazy autumn sort of weather that gets me,” he telephoned nervously one morning.  “I don’t want to work and I’ve got to finish this stuff for Graham to-day.  He’ll pay at once if I do.  Garry, I’m going to lock the studio door and throw the key over the transom to you.  Don’t let me out, no matter what I say.”