"Oh, my God!" said Kenny, wiping his forehead. "I'll stay!"
"Good!" said Adam, moistening his lips. "Good! You know, Kenny," he whispered, shivering, "I--I hate the rain."
"Kenny," said the old man later when Kenny had carried the lamp back and made sure that Joan had gone to her room, "don't sulk. You're old enough to know better."
Kenny did not trouble to reply. Whatever he said would be combated.
"Music," insisted Adam, "makes you as noisy as a magpie. If you're not whistling, you're singing some damned rake of an Irish song and if you're not singing, you're at the piano battering out a scrap-heap of tunes."
"From the first day until the last when he goes to sleep with a daisy quilt over him," said Kenny stiffly, "an Irishman lives his life to music."
"Humph!" said the old man, ready for battle, "the music of his own voice, telling lies."
Reckless, Kenny used his one weapon of composure. It made the old man cough with fury and propel himself up and down the room in his wheel-chair until, with a feeling of whirling fire in his brain, Kenny wondered if a man could lose his sanity by watching an infuriated lunatic in a wheel-chair narrowly miss everything in his way.
But he made no further effort at rebellion. Instead he went each night, invincible in his determination not to be outdone. When by playing on his pity Adam trapped him he smiled and shrugged. When the old man assailed him with shafts of truth, no matter what the aftermath of communion with himself and his notebook, he accepted it with composure and an air of interest. When in a fury, Adam reviled him for his phlegm, he laughed and was cursed for his pains.
"You told me, Adam," he said, "that my greatest drawback is a habit of excitement and temper. Excitable I shall probably be all my life. It's temperamental. But I'm learning to control my temper."
In a week his coolness and composure were bearing horrible fruit.
Exhausted by blind fits of rage, racking spells of coughing and more brandy than usual, the invalid's weakness became pitifully apparent. He seemed now but a shaking shadow, gray and gaunt. Even the doctor, who accepted him with fatalistic calm, confessed alarm. And Kenny, with his teeth set and his fingers clenched in his hair, faced another problem. He was to blame and he alone! What in the literal name of mercy was he to do?