The result was disastrous.  There are times when one cannot endure the prosperity of his friends!  Had Sylvia come back with her banners trailing, Joan and Patricia would have rallied to her standard, but she was cool, crisp, and her eyes were fixed upon a successful future.

She was going to do, not only the frieze, but a dozen other things.  People whom she had met had been impressed.  Things were coming her way with a vengeance.  One order was in the Far West—­a glorified cabin in a canyon.

“I’m to do all the interior decorating,” Sylvia bubbled; “a little out of my line, but they feel I can do it.  And”—­here the girl looked blissful—­“it will be near enough for my John to come and take a vacation.”

Patricia and Joan, at that moment, knew the resentment of the unattached woman for the protected one.  Sylvia appeared the child of the gods while they were merely permitted to sit at the gates and envy her triumphs.

“I suppose,” Patricia burst in, “that this means the end?”

“End?” Sylvia looked puzzled.

“Yes.  Plain John will gobble you, Art and all.  But your duties here——­” Patricia with a tragic gesture pointed to Joan.  “What of Miss Lamb, not to mention me?”

Sylvia looked serious.

“Joan is to study music next winter,” she said; “haven’t you told Pat, Joan?”

Joan shook her head.  She had almost forgotten it herself.

“And live with her people,” Sylvia went on and then, noticing Patricia’s pale little face, she burst forth: 

“Pat, take that offer from Chicago that you’ve been thinking about!  It’s a big thing—­designing for that firm.  It will make you independent, leave you time to scribble, and give you a change.  Pat, do be sensible.”

Patricia drew herself up.  She felt that she was being disposed of simply to get her out of the way.  She resented it and she was hurt.

“I do not have to decide just now,” she said, coldly; “and don’t fuss about me, Syl.  Now that you and Joan are provided for I can jog along at my own free will, and no one will have to pay but me!”

“Pat!” Joan broke in, “you and I will stick together.  And it’s all right about Syl.  What is this one life for, anyway, if it does not leave us free?  Syl, marry your John—­your art won’t suffer!  Pat, where I go you go next winter.”

But Patricia lighted a cigarette, and while the smoke issued from her pretty little nose she sighed.

What happened was this:  Patricia shopped and sewed for Sylvia and made her radiantly ready for her trip West.  And Joan, feeling the break final, although she did not admit it, forsook her own pleasures while she helped Patricia and clung to Sylvia.

“Pat has sublet her rooms,” she confided to Sylvia one day, “and is coming here until our lease is up; so you are foot-loose, my precious Syl, and God bless you!”

In August Sylvia departed and Joan and Patricia set up housekeeping together.  But at the end of the first week, and the beginning of a new hot spell, Joan found a note on her pillow one night when she came in, exhausted: