And off Sylvia went with her heavy bag and her light heart, and Joan called Patricia up on the telephone.

“All right,” Patricia responded, “but if I get homesick for these rooms, I must be free to come.”

“Of course,” Joan agreed.

Patricia was in a dangerous mood and Joan was vividly alive to impressions.

Patricia was writing verses as a bird carols—­just letting them pour out.  She was selling them, too, and running out to New Jersey to talk over with Mr. Burke the publication of a book.

“I cannot see,” Patricia had said to Sylvia, “why one should feel it necessary to stick to hot, smelly offices when a library, looking out over acres of country, is at one’s disposal.”

“Is Mrs. Burke there?”

Sylvia had a terrible way of stepping on toes when she was making her point.

“Certainly!” Patricia flung back—­it happened that the lady was there for a brief time—­“though,” Patricia went on, “she doesn’t sit on the arm of my chair while styles of paper are considered.  You’re low-minded, Syl.”

Patricia looked so high-minded just then that everyone laughed at Sylvia’s expense.

And Joan, because she was young as the year was, kept remembering the eyes, and feeling the touch of Kenneth Raymond.  There were no words to explain her mood, but she remembered the sound of his voice—­and she wanted to see him again!

She believed her emotions were grounded upon the fact that she knew a good deal about Raymond—­more than he suspected.  He was of Aunt Doris’s safe and clean world.  He was only dipping into a pool outside of his own legitimate preserves to touch, as he thought, a lily that should not be there!

Raymond had suggested this to Joan.  He fancied, from his conservative limitations, that the Brier Bush was rather a dubious pool!

“If he only knew!” Joan thought, and was glad that he did not.  How humdrum it all would have been had he known!  As it was, the wonderful feeling she had was laid upon a very safe foundation—­not even Aunt Doris or Sylvia could object—­and she would tell them all about it some day, and it would be part of the free, happy life and a proof that no harm can come where one understands the situation and has high motives.

But Raymond did not come to the Brier Bush, and so Joan had to conclude that he had not that unnamable emotion which was taking her appetite away, and he was forgetting, perhaps, all about that line that ran in the palms of both of them!

As a matter of fact, Raymond was trying very diligently to do just that thing.  He worked hard and paid extra attention to Mrs. Tweksbury.

“My boy!” Emily Tweksbury urged, “come up to Maine with me for the summer, you look peaked.”

Raymond laughed.

“How about business?” he said.