immensity of romantic experience, holding out his hands to her, with
tender eyes and a look of youth and charm and understanding in his vivid
face.

She had fought through drab and solitude to dreams and formless craving,
this girl of the hills. What things of vigor her life had known were
cruel: a passionate shrinking from her uncle, a fear for the brother who
had hotly rebelled at the meager life around him, a loneliness aloof from
her kind and a vague hunger for some fuller, sweeter life beyond the
hills. And with a blast of a horn the drab had vanished.

There were times when the girl's soft eyes opened wide in a panic of
incredulity. He was a famous painter, this Irishman who had prevailed
upon her in a laughing moment to call him Kenny; a famous painter with a
personality as vivid as his face. And yet he chose to linger at her
uncle's farm. The color, the gayety, the sparkle, he seemed miraculously
to infuse into existence, left her breathless and startled. And he knew
not one spot and one land. He knew many spots, some wild and remote, and
many lands. Joan marveled at the twist of Fate that had brought him to
the willow.

His individuality made its own appeal. But there were subtler forces
working to the girl's surrender. One, a deep abiding gratitude to him
and Brian. Though she ran down the lane each morning and peered into the
letter box at the end for word of Donald, her disappointment now had
nothing in it of terror. Donald, Kenny said, was with an O'Neill. He
could not go wrong. She accepted the statement, as she had accepted the
stage mother, with utter faith and gladness.

And Kenny was kind to her uncle and to her; kind with an infinite