Nancy met her with the brightest of smiles.

“Doctor Martin has gone away, Mary,” she explained, “and now I will be terribly busy, but next winter—­oh! next winter, Mary, Joan will be with us in the dear old house.  A letter came to-day—­she is going to take lessons from a very great teacher.  Do you remember how Joan could sing, Mary?  I shall play for her again and be so happy.  It’s wonderful how happy one can be, Mary, when one isn’t afraid and just goes singing ahead.  I cannot sing like Joan, but I can scare away fears!”

Mary regarded the girl with a hungry craving in her eyes over which the lids were drawn to a slit.  There was a fierce intentness in the gaze:  the look of the runner who has almost reached the goal but hears his pursuers close.

CHAPTER XVI

“And they planted their feet on the ’Sun Road’.”

If the spring has a direct and concentrated effect upon a young man’s fancy, it must have equal effect upon a young woman’s, else the man’s would perish and come to look upon the spring as the lean part of the year.  Joan had meant all she said when, in the strength and virtue of her youth, she had drawn herself away from Kenneth Raymond and proudly remarked: 

“Certainly not!  And I am not afraid.”

Both statements were sincere and should have brought her peace and satisfaction.  They did neither.

Raymond had, apparently, taken her at her word, and sought other places in which to appease his hunger, and Joan turned to Patricia, for Sylvia was called out of town.

That dream of a frieze that had long smouldered in Sylvia’s soul had broken bounds and a rich man, erecting a summer home on the Massachusetts coast, having seen some of Sylvia’s work, had invited her down to “talk over” the frieze idea.

“And he’ll let me do it!” Sylvia had confided breathlessly to Joan as she packed her suitcase.  “I can always tell when a thing is going to come true.  Now if I had shown him sketches he might not have taken me—­but when I can talk my pictures all along the walls of his big, sunny room it will be another matter.

“Blue background”—­Sylvia was forgetting Joan as she rambled on, punching and jamming her clothing into the case—­“and a bit of a story running through the frieze—­a kind of sea-nymph search for the Holy Grail—­stretching from the door back to the door.  Can’t you see it, Joan?”

Joan could not.  She was seeing something else.  Something daily becoming visualized.  A seeking, yearning desire issuing from her soul and trying to find—­what?

“You’ll have Pat here?” suddenly asked Sylvia.  “I’d rather have someone besides Pat, but the others are either away or worse than Pat.  You’re good for Pat if she isn’t for you.  You sort of stiffen her up—­she told me so.  Pat needs whalebone.  When her purse gets flat her morals dwindle; mine always get scared stiff.  I’ll write twice a week, Joan, my lamb, Sunday and Wednesday.  I’ll be back before long.”