It was inevitable, with songs for everything, that he would have songs, like the tenderer tones of his voice, that he kept for Joan alone, songs that came softly to his lips when Nature stirred his fancy and Joan was at his side in an old-time gown.
A lone pine, a wild geranium, a lark or Joan's garden where the heliotrope grew; they were sparks to a fire of inspiration that came forth in song.
"What is it, Kenny?" Joan asked one sunset when Kenny on the farm porch was finding the subtleties of color for her in the darkening valley below them and the western sky above the hills.
"What's what, Arbutus, dear?" he asked with guile.
The "dear" didn't bother her. It was frequently "Hannah, dear!" and "Hetty, dear!" and Hughie was often "Hughie, darlin'."
"Why," asked Joan, "do you call me Arbutus?"
"Because you're like one," he said gently.
"'My Love's an Arbutus,'" said Kenny demurely. He knew at once that he must not step so far ahead again. She looked a little frightened. Kenny instantly called her attention to a gap in the range of hills to the west.
"Like the Devil's Bit in Ireland," he said. "There the devil, poor lad, bit a chunk out of a mountain and not liking the morsel over well, treated it as you and I would treat a cherry pit."
"True." said Kenny, "every word of it. I myself have seen the chunk he threw away. Tis the Rock of Cashel. He's been bitin' again over there, I take it. To-morrow you and I will go down into the valley, seek the unappetizin' rock he rejected and look it over."
"I think most likely," said Joan, "the farm's built on it."
And then the sound of the horn came over the water and Joan ran.
With the valley filled with the first haze of twilight and the hills still aglow, Kenny sat on the farm porch and brooded. He had not meant to frighten her. The Arbutus gallantry he had considered strategic and poetic. There was the baffling thing about her that kept him piqued. She was always shy and elusive. Of convention she knew nothing at all; yet like the shrine in the garret she kept herself apart and precious. Always she seemed fluttering just ahead of him, like a will-of-the-wisp. If he touched her hand ever so gently she drew it away. The caresses most girls he had known would have understood and accepted as part of the summer idyl, he knew, instinctively, would be evaded.