"If you said that to Renny, he'd say: 'Yes, but I don't get up on a stage with them and charge people admission to watch my antics.' Most of all, it was the half-wittedness of the part. He thinks I'm a bit that way already." He pulled his lips again, and then went on more quickly, so that the tale of his misdeeds might be done with. "So there was no more play-acting. The next thing was an orchestra. George Fennel—you remember the boys at the rectory, Alayne—and myself and three other chaps got it up—a banjo, two mandolins, a flute, and the piano. All the practising was done on the sly. We played for club dances. You know the sort of club it would be. Cheap restaurants. But we made quite a lot of money—five dollars apiece, each night."
Alayne looked at him with a mingling of admiration and amusement. "What amazing boys! Had you planned to do anything special with all this money?"
"We bought quite a good radio. We had that at the rectory, of course."
"Where did Mr. Fennel think that came from?"
"Oh, he never asks many questions. He's awfully unpractical. He probably thought we'd rigged it up out of some odds and ends of wire. Then some of the money went toward hearing some good music—Paderewski, Kreisler. But I saved most of it. That's how I got here, to New York. And then too we'd blow in quite a bit on grub. I'm always hungry, you know."
There was a peculiar expression on his face, as he said this, that startled Alayne. A sudden break in his voice. She thought: "Is it possible the boy is hungry now?" She said: "You're like I am. I'm always getting hungry at odd times. Here it is, only half-past eight, and I'm starving. But of course I didn't eat much dinner. Supposing, Finch, that you tell me quickly how things came to a head, and then we can have the details over some supper."
He agreed, in his odd, hesitating way, and then, in a muffled voice, told of the last performance of the orchestra, of his return to Jalna, of the scene in the washroom. "It wasn't only that I'd been lit, and was feeling dazed—oh,
