Eden threw the door open. "One might as well," he complained in a high voice, "live next door to a circus. You're the most disgusting young—" and he delivered himself of some atrocious language. He interrupted himself to ask, cocking his head, "Is he crying? What's he crying for?"
"Just low-spirited, I expect," replied Piers, in a sleepy voice.
"What are you crying for, Finch?"
"Let me alone, can't you?" screamed Finch, in a sudden fury. "You let me alone!"
"I think he's sniveling over his report. Renny was up in the air about it," said Piers.
"Oh, is that it? Well, study will do more than sniveling to help that." And Eden disappeared as he had come.
The two brothers lay in the moonlight. Finch was quiet save for an occasional gulp. Piers's feelings toward him were magnanimous now. He was such a helpless young fool. Piers thought it rather hard that he had been born between Eden and Finch. Wedged in between a poet and a fool. What a sandwich! Of a certainty, he was the meaty part.
His thoughts turned to Pheasant. She was of never-failing interest to him: her pretty gestures, her reckless way of throwing her heart open to him, her sudden withdrawals, the remoteness of her profile. He could see her face in the moonlight as though she were in the room with him. Soon she would be, instead of snuffling young Finch! He loved her with every inch of his body. He alone of all the people in Jalna knew what real love was. Strange that, being absorbed by love as he was, he should have time to play with young Finch and make him miserable. No denying that there lurked a mischievous devil in him. Then, too, he had suffered so much anxiety lately that to have everything settled, to be certain of hav-
