“‘Pagliacci!’” demanded someone.

Kreiling laughed indulgently and beckoned Jan to the piano.  His big voice, powerful and tender, swept into the hush like a splendid bird.

Kenny snapped off the lights, plunged into tragic sadness by the passion of his voice.  Somehow its poignant sweetness hurt.  The droplight over the music and the flare of the fire leaped out of the darkness like medallions.  Faintly from a corner came the whisper of Caesare’s violin, offering obligato.

Then he closed his eyes to block but the sight of rain splashing on the window.  Enchanted rain surely!  For it transformed the single pane into many, like a checkerboard of glass, and through it he was staring queerly into the farm.

Kreiling mopped his forehead at the end and switched on the lights.  The silence he understood and liked but his keen eyes lingered in surprise on Kenny’s face.  His color was gone, his eyes curiously tired and wistful.

“So!” said Kreiling gently and passed on to the cheese with deliberate tact, pushing Jan away.  A minute later his hand came down with heartiness on Kenny’s shoulder.

“Spitzbube!” he rumbled affectionately.

Kenny laughed but Whitaker saw that his cigarette was shaking.

“Music,” he reflected, feeling sympathetic, “always makes him wild and sentimental.  And Max sang like an archangel.”

“Now, Kenny,” commanded Kreiling, nibbling cheese and rye bread, “play.”

Kenny sullenly obeyed.  After the first effort, something rebellious touched his sullen mood to fire and he played fragments of the Second Rhapsodic with madness in his touch.

Sid, aware of it, stared in round-eyed apprehension at his back.

“He’s just in the mood again for rocketing,” he decided.

From then on Kenny’s reckless gayety kept them in an uproar.

When someone clamored for a wood-fire tale he told them of Finn’s love for Deirdre.  But the discussion it provoked bored him and he dropped back, smoking, in his chair,

“There is love and love,” said Max Kreiling, “and to be in love is torture and a thing of self, but when the big splendid tenderness comes after the storm of self and craving, the tenderness that knows more of giving than of demanding, it comes to stay.  But it’s not the love of barbarity like Finn’s.  It’s an evolution.”

“Ask Kenny,” said Mac mischievously.  “He’s an expert.”

“Love, my son,” said Kenny wearily, “is poetic like summer lightning.  It flashes, blinds in a glory of light—­and then disappears—­in time.”

He tired early and sent them home.  Whitaker longed to linger but the moody cordiality of Kenny’s good night was only too significant.  He departed with regret.

“Garry!” called Kenny at the door.

Garry turned back.

“I meant you to wait,” said Kenny irritably, “but you got out before I could tell you.”  He closed the door.  “Garry, what were the men in the grill saying to-night when I came in?”