He could not see that he was making any headway.
Adam listened with baffling intentness while his strange guest practiced strangely the telling of truth. He refuted nothing. He accepted everything that Kenny said with a corroborative, birdlike nod of politeness. With the megaphone upon the floor by Kenny's chair, he made no further pretense of deafness. He said nothing at all and Kenny found his new inscrutable trick of silence unendurable. One singular fact loomed out above all others. Adam shamelessly accepted the word miser with a gloating chuckle. He seemed to like it. For Kenny, generous to a fault and prodigal with money, the word embodied all things hideous.
There were times when Kenny abandoned the hopeless battle and came at Adam's plea, reserved and sullen. Then with a solicitous air of virtue the old man urged him to renew it.
"Kenny," he demanded more than once, "have you got your practicing done? You lack application. If you're ever to learn truth at your stage of ignorance you'll have to have it."
The goad went home. He did lack application. And Joan must not suffer from that lack.
But in the end the old man tired him out; and the practice of truth became a boomerang.
Adam Craig smoothly demanded reciprocal privileges. Once more he told Kenny the truth about himself and drove the tormented Irishman again and again to his notebook. It had for him a morbid fascination. No matter how resolute the disdain with which he began to read it, he finished with his color high and his eyes incredulous and indignant. The barbs failed to lose their sting. They sank deeper and deeper. In a terror of defense Kenny returned to the fray with added vim. But Adam had a deftness with his barbs that his opponent lacked. Compassion drove the younger man to restraint. And Adam did not scruple to hide behind the bulwark of his own debility.
Night after night, mutinous at the glaring fact that in this singular battle of truth, Adam Craig was winning, Kenny rushed out into the peace and darkness of the night to seek Joan. It was inevitable that he should see in the wistaria ladder the means to starlit hours of delight. It was inevitable that Joan, to whom the vine was no more than an old, familiar stairway, would climb down to him with that shy oblivion of convention that was as much a part of her as her will-of-the-wisp charm.
They roamed in the dark silver of the star-light to the cabin in the pines and the hours that Joan had spent with Mr. Abbott or the books she loved, fell tinkling now with new melody into the lap of time. In the rude room, bright with lamplight and the trophies of childhood, the girl listened tirelessly to a musical Irish voice that read to her with brogue and tenderness enough to insure her interest in the reader no less than in his task. Kenny blessed the village congregation that had sent Mr. Abbott forth upon his needed month of recreation.
When the nights were cool enough, they built a fire of pine cones in the cabin stove and made tea and Kenny talked of Brian to ease his troubled heart. Joan listened wide-eyed to tales of the son Kenny said was all things in one.