[Illustration: He was sailing across to romance, he hoped, and surely to mystery.]
"It was down there," said Joan, nodding, "where the river bends, that Brian had his camp."
Brian's name was a shock. Kenny came to earth for an instant. Only for an instant. The monochrome of gold behind the gables was drifting into color. Here between the wooded heights where the river ran, already there was shadow. Twilight and afterglow! Kenny in poetic vein told of the Gray Man of the Path. The Path was in Ireland, a fissure in the cliff at Fairhead. If you climbed well you could use the Gray Man's Path and scale the cliff. Kenny himself had climbed it. Joan, busy with the single oar, lost nevertheless no single word of it. She was eager and intent.
"I suppose," said Kenny, "that the Gray Man is the spirit of the mists of Benmore. But to me he's always Twilight. Twilight anywhere."
The girl nodded, quick to catch his mood.
"And to-night," she said, "his path is the river. He's coming now."
Kenny's Gray Man of the Twilight was stealing closer when they landed.
With the feeling of dreams still upon him he followed the girl up the path. It wound steeply upward among the trees, with here and there a rude step fashioned of a boulder, and came out in an orchard on a hill.