The words sounded like explosives, and Joan mentally dodged, but at the end felt that she knew all there was to know and she caught her breath and said very slowly: 

“I’m going to be quite as honest as you are.  I will have dinner with you because I’m as lonely as can be; my people, like yours, are out of town, and I do understand though I cannot say just how I do.  One thing I want you to promise:  You will never, under any circumstances, try to find out more about me than I freely give.  Now or—­ever!  When I disappear, I want really to be safe from intrusion.”

Raymond promised, and so they set out on the Sun Road.

CHAPTER XVII

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own.”

The trouble with the Sun Road is this:  one is apt to be blinded by the glare.

In their solitude, the solitude of a big city, Raymond and Joan trod the shining way with high courage.

This was romance in an age when romance was supposed to be dead!  Here they were, they two, nameless—­for they decided upon remaining so—­living according to their own codes; feeling more and more secure, as time passed, that they were safe and were wisely enjoying what so easily might have been lost had they been limited in faith.

“It’s the line in our hands!” Raymond declared.  “It means something, all right.  Think what we must have missed had we been unjust to each other and ourselves.”

Joan nodded.

The sun and the dust of the pleasant highway had blinded her completely by the end of a week.

Patricia was a missing quantity most of the time.  Patricia had taken to the Sun Road, also, but with her eyes wide open.  If Patricia ever turned aside it would be because she knew the danger, not because she did not.

She never explained her absences nor her private affairs to Joan.  When she did appear at Sylvia’s studio she was quiet and nervous.

“It’s the heat,” she explained.  “I’m not hot, but I cannot get enough air to breathe.”

Meanwhile, Sylvia was basking in success and cool breezes on the Massachusetts coast.  Her letters had the tang of the sea.

And Raymond was always on hand, now, at the dinner hour.  He was like a boy, and took great pride in his knowledge of just the right places to eat.  Quiet, but not too quiet; good food, and, occasionally, good music, and if the night was not too hot, a dance with Joan which set his very soul to keeping time.

“Gee!” he said, after their first dance; “I wonder what you are, anyway?  Do you do everything—­to perfection?”

Joan twinkled.

“Every man must decide that for himself,” she replied with a charming turn of her head.

“Every—­man?” Raymond’s face fell.

“Certainly.  You don’t think you are the only man, do you?”