"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.
He telephoned the doctor's farm and found him ready to start his weary ambulant day; hamlet to hamlet, farm to farm, until dusk and often after. The bare thought of it filled Kenny with sympathetic gloom. Then his brain began again to burn in speculation. Frowning, he turned back homewards up the hill and through the wood, where the road lay, rough and lonely.
With his mind upon it he evolved Nellie from her harness and led her into the stall. When he had done with her halter he found that Joan had slipped into the barn and stood a little way off, her soft eyes intent upon him.
"Joan!" he exclaimed radiantly. The sight of her was like a lilac wind in fog. The fog fled and you found the world clear and fragrant.
She came to him instantly, her face like a colorless flower, a faint shadow in her eyes.
"Colleen!" said Kenny. He kissed her gently. Again he was conscious with a flurried feeling of impatience that the force of his tenderness would not rise to his lips. He whose words of love had been so fluent and poetic!