"Kenny," said Whitaker, his patience quite gone, "are you mad? How on
earth did Brian force you into that lie?"

"By not coming home," said Kenny sulkily. "If he'd come home as a lad
should, I needn't have told it. You can see that for yourself."

Whitaker dazedly threw up his hands.

Having successfully baffled his opponent with the brilliancy of his
unreason, Kenny enlarged upon the humiliation he must experience when
Garry learned the truth. At a familiar climax of self-glorification,
in which Kenny claimed he had saved Brian from no end of club-gossip by
his timely evasion of the truth, Whitaker lost his temper and went home.

He left his host in a dangerous mood of quiet.

It was a quiet unlike Kenny, who hated to think, and presently he flung
his pipe across the studio, fuming at what seemed to him unprecedented
disorder. It was getting on his nerves. No man could work in such a
hodge-podge. Even inspiration was likely to be chaotic and futuristic.
Small blame to Brian if he resented it all. To-morrow, if Reynolds
deigned to appear with his check, he would summon Mrs. Haggerty, and
the studio should have a cleaning that the mercenary old beldame would
remember. Kenny vaguely coupled Mrs. Haggerty with the present
disorder and resented both, his defiant eyes lingering with new
interest upon a jumble of musical instruments in a corner.

With a muffled objurgation he fell upon the jumble and began to
overhaul it. The object sought defied his fevered efforts to unearth