“That,” said Adam Craig with a shudder, “will be enough of your damned ghosts and fairies.”

Afterward to Kenny the evening was always a blur but he knew they had gotten on badly.  And Adam, quiet and sullen, had drunk more than usual.

Kenny sparkled through the evening in a baffling, dreamlike oblivion to everything but his thoughts, and floated away to his room, feeling curiously light and iridescent.

He meant not to sleep.  He meant to roll the shades to the top and with the cold wind upon his face and the stars winking in silver beneficence overhead, to lie awake and think until the dawn came.  He slept soundly, dreaming of thistledown and a little old woman in a green cloak who came out of a hill and played a tune upon a sort of lantern-flute.  The notes had winged off in bars of music written in fire against the darkness.  He had not finished the dream when he was awakened by someone knocking at his door.

It was Hughie, his face pale and disturbed.

“Mr. O’Neill,” he said, “I’m wondering if you’d drive down to the village and telephone the doctor to come here first.  Mr. Craig’s had a bad fall.  He’s unconscious.”

“Unconscious!” exclaimed Kenny, changing color.  “How on earth, Hughie, did he fall?”

“I don’t know,” said Hughie sadly.  “He must have climbed out of bed in the night.”

“But, Hughie, he couldn’t!”

“He could stagger a step or two,” explained Hughie.  “Not far.  The trouble’s in his spine.  But he never dragged himself so far before.”

“How far?”

“From his bed to his sitting room.  I found him in a heap by the fire.”

“Poor devil!” said Kenny, shocked.

He dressed quickly.  Hannah helped him hitch the old mare to the buggy and found him nervous and unfamiliar with his task.  Kenny drove off down the lane, oppressed by the bleak wind and the bare black tangle of branches ahead of him.  The tragic effort of Adam’s wasted legs had left him startled and uneasy.  For the life of him he could not put out of his mind the tale of the old Irish woman and the chair she had left by the fire on the Eve of All Souls for the visit of her dead son.  It had bothered Adam Craig and made him shudder.  It bothered Kenny now.  He wished he hadn’t remembered it last night or to-day.  But the sound of Nellie’s hoofs plodding along the soft dirt road was no more recurrent than his own foreboding.  It filled him with sadness and guilt.  Adam perhaps had dragged himself to the sitting room fire in a drunken fit of superstition.  Seeking what?  Someone he had wronged?  The sinister spark inflamed his fancy.  His brain whirled.  Inexplicably the tale of the fairy mill and the rascal who stole the widow’s bag of meal linked itself with the mishap of the night before.  Then too Adam had fallen forward in his chair unconscious.

Nellie stumbled and jolted Kenny into sanity.  He put his thoughts aside in horror.  But dreadful strings of mystery converged persistently to one point:  Adam Craig, the pitiful old miser who for some reason huddled every book in the farmhouse on his shelves.  Fate cruelly had brought melancholy into this, the first morning of his love.  Kenny shivered with resentment.