No leaf that dawns to petal,
      But hints the Angel-plan.

Joan looked up and saw Cameron at the doorway.  He almost filled it, and his eyes grew troubled as he noted the thin, white, tear-wet face.

“Shall I close the door?” he asked.

“No.  Please do not.  I like to think that all the others, down the corridor, and I are together—­listening, growing better!”

“Oh!  I see.”  Cameron tossed aside his coat and sat down.

“I—­I don’t think you do,” Joan smiled at him; “I think I puzzle you terribly, but some day I am going to explain everything.  All my life I have been, as I am now, in a narrow little room—­peeping out and never touching others any more than I am touching”—­she pointed to the right and left—­“my neighbours, here.  But we were all listening to much the same thing then as now.

“I am going”—­here Joan dashed her tears off—­“I am going somehow to pull the walls down and know really!”

“Bully!” Cameron had a peculiar feeling in his throat.  Then added:  “I cut something out of a paper the other day that seemed to me to hold all the philosophy necessary for this tug-of-war we call life.  Here it is!”

“Read it, please,” Joan dropped her eyes.

    “A shipwrecked sailor, buried here, bids you set sail. 
    Full many a gallant bark, when he was lost, weathered the gale.”

“Isn’t that good, gripping stuff?  I’ve caught the sense of it, and when I get to thinking—­well, of such as lie in many of these little rooms, I’m glad—­you’re—­setting sail!”

“Thank you, Doctor Cameron.  I am setting sail!  I thought I was before—­I see the difference now.  And to-morrow——­”

“And to-morrow—­where are you going—­to-morrow?”

Cameron was ill at ease.

“To a little hotel—­I will give you the address in the morning.  It is from there that I will set sail.”

CHAPTER XXIII

“No one can travel that road for you, you must travel it for yourself.”

David Martin came into the living room of Ridge House bringing, as it seemed, the Spring with him.  He left the door open and sat down.  He was in rough clothes; he was brown and rugged.  He was building, with his own hands, much of the cabin at Blowing Rock.  He had never been more content in his life.  He often paused, as he was now doing, and thought of it.

The hard winter’s work was over and Martin felt the spring in his blood as he had not felt it in many a year.

Things were going to suit him—­and they had had a way of eluding him in the past.  Perhaps, he thought, because he had always wanted them just his way.

Somewhere, above stairs, Doris was singing, and Nancy from another part of the house was calling out little joyous remarks.

“Two telegrams in one day, Aunt Doris.  Such riches!”

Doris paused in her song long enough to reply: