fireworks."

Surprised and nettled, Kenny obeyed in spite of himself.

"Now," went on Whitaker quietly, "I came here to-night because I'm Brian's friend and yours." He ignored the incredulous arch of Kenny's eyebrows. "Where Brian is, where he will be, I don't propose to tell you, now or at any other time. His wheres and his whens are the boy's own business. His whys I think you know. He won't be back."

"He will!" thundered Kenny and thumped upon the table with his fist.

Whitaker patiently reassembled his supper.

"I think not," he said.

"You're not here to think," blazed Kenny. "You're here to tell me what you know."

"I'm here," corrected John Whitaker, "to get a few facts out of my system for your own good and Brian's. Kenny, how much of the truth can you stand?"

Kenny threw up his hands with a reminiscent gesture of despair.

"Truth!" he repeated. "Truth!"

"I know," put in Whitaker, "that you regard the truth as something sacred, to be handled with delicacy and discretion. But—"

Kenny told him sullenly to tell it if he could.

"I don't propose to urge Brian back here for a good many reasons. In the first place, he's not a painter—"

"John," interrupted Kenny hotly, "you are no judge of that. I, Kennicott O'Neill, am his father."

"And more's the pity," said Whitaker bluntly, "for you've made a mess of it. That's another reason."

Kenny turned a dark red.

"You mean?"

"I mean, Kenny," said Whitaker, his glance calm and level, "that as a parent for Brian, you are an abject failure."

The word stung. It was the first time in his life that Kenny had faced it. That he, Kennicott O'Neill, Academician, with Heaven knows how many medals of distinction, could fail at anything, was a new thought, bewildering and bitter. This time he escaped from the table and flung up a window. Whitaker, he grumbled, never toasted crackers without burning them. Whitaker brought him back with a look.

"Sit down," he said again. "I don't propose to talk while you roam around the studio and kick things."

Kenny obeyed. He looked a little white.

"I've tried to think this thing out fairly," said Whitaker. "Why as a parent for Brian you're a failure—"

"Well?"

"And the first and fundamental cause of your failure is, I think, your hairbrained, unquenchable youth."

Kenny stared at him in astounded silence.

"I remember once around the fire here you told a Celtic tale of some golden islands—Tirnanoge, wasn't it?—the Land of the Young—"

Might have been, Kenny said perversely. He didn't remember.

"Ossian lived there with the daughter of the King of Youth for three hundred years that seemed but three," reminded Whitaker. "Well, no matter. The point is this: The Land of the Young and the King of Youth always make me think of you."

"It is true," said Kenny with biting sarcasm, "that I still have hair and teeth. It is also true that I am the respectable if unsuccessful parent of a son twenty-three years old and I myself am forty-four."

"Forty-four years young," admitted Whitaker. "And Brian on the other hand is twenty-three years old. There you have it. You know precisely what I mean, Kenny. Youth isn't always a matter of years. It's a state of being. Sometimes it's an affliction and sometimes a gift. Sometimes it's chronic and sometimes it's contagious enough to start an epidemic. You're as young and irresponsible as the wind. You've never grown up. God knows whether or not you ever will. But Brian has. There's the clash."

"Go on," said Kenny with a dangerous flash of interest in his eyes. "You've an undeniable facility, John, with what you call the truth."

"It's an unfortunate characteristic of highly temperamentalized individuals—"

"Painters, Irishmen and O'Neills," put in Kenny with sulky impudence.

"That they frequently skirt the rocks for themselves with amazing skill. I mean just this: They don't always shipwreck their own lives."

Was that, Kenny would like to know, an essential of successful parenthood?

"I mean," he paraphrased dryly, "must you wreck your own life, John, to parent somebody else with skill?" The wording of this rather pleased him. He brightened visibly.

Whitaker ignored his brazen air of assurance. It was like Kenny, he reflected, to find an unexpected loophole and emerge from it with the air of a conqueror.

"People with an over-plus of temperament," he said, "wreck the lives of others. Brian has just stepped out in the nick of time."

"You mean," flashed Kenny with anger in his eyes, "you mean I've tried to wreck the life of my own son? By the powers of war, John, that's too much!"

"I didn't say you had tried. I mean merely that you were accidentally succeeding. The sunsets—"

"Damn the sunsets!" roared Kenny, losing his head.

"It was time for that," agreed Whitaker.

"Time for what?"

"You usually damn the irrefutable thing. Why you wanted Brian to paint pictures," went on Whitaker, ignoring Kenny's outraged sputter, "when he couldn't, is and always has been a matter of considerable worry and mystery to me—"

"It needn't have been. That, I fancy, John, you can see for yourself. I worry very little about how your paper is run."

"But I think I've solved it. It's your vanity."

"My God!" said Kenny with a gasp.

"You wanted to have a hand in what he did. Then you could afford to be gracious. There are some, Kenny, who must always direct in order to enjoy."

There was a modicum of enjoyment with Whitaker around, hinted Kenny sullenly.

Whitaker found his irrelevant trick of umbrage trying in the extreme. He lost his temper and said that which he had meant to leave to inference.

"Kenny, Brian's success, in which you, curiously enough, seem to have had a visionary faith, would have linked him to you in a sort of artistic dependence in which you shone with inferential genius and generosity."

It hurt.

"So!" said Kenny, his color high.

"It may be," said Whitaker, feeling sorry for him, "that I've put that rather strongly but I think I've dug into the underlying something which, linked with your warm-hearted generosity and a real love for Brian, made you stubborn and unreasonable about his work. Of the big gap in temperament and the host of petty things that maddened Brian to the point of distraction, it's unnecessary for me to speak. You must know that your happy-go-lucky self-indulgence more often than not has spelled discomfort of a definite sort for Brian. You're generous, I'll admit. Generous to a fault. But your generosity is always congenial. It's never the sort that hurts. The only kind of generosity that will help in this crisis is the kind that hurts. It's up to you, Kenny, to do some mental house-cleaning, admit the cobwebs and brush them away, instead of using them fantastically for drapery."

Whitaker thanked his lucky stars he'd gotten on so well. Kenny, affronted, was usually more capricious and elusive.

"Whitaker," said Kenny, his eyes imploring, "you don't—you can't mean that Brian isn't coming back?"

Whitaker sighed. After all, Kenny never heard all of anything, just as he never read all of a letter unless it was asterisked and under-lined and riveted to his attention by a multitude of pen devices.

"Kenny, have you been listening?"

"No!" lied Kenny.

"Brian," flung out Whitaker wrathfully, "isn't coming back. I thank God for his sake."

His loss of temper brought a hornet's nest about his ears. Kenny swung to his feet in smoldering fury. He expressed his opinion of Whitaker, editors, Brian and sons. The sum of them merged into an unchristian melee of officiousness and black ingratitude. He recounted the events of the night before with stinging sarcasm in proof of Brian's regularity. He ended magnificently by blaming Brian for the disorder of the studio. There were handles everywhere. And Brian in an exuberance of amiability had broken