Joan sat down and waited.  It was always to be so with her from now on.  In that hour a great and tender patience was born that was to calm and guide her future life.  She was given, then and there, to draw upon the strength and vision that do not err.  And it may have been that in sleep Doris Fletcher, too, was prepared, for when suddenly she opened her eyes upon Joan she was not startled:  a gladness that was almost painful overspread her face.

“My darling!  You have come at last!” was what she said.

And, as on that night when she had come to plead for freedom, Joan did not, now, rush into human touch.  She nodded and whispered: 

“I’ve come as I promised to, Aunt Dorrie.  It—­it wasn’t my chance!  Not my big chance, anyhow, but I had to find out, dearie.”

“My little girl!”

Joan went nearer; she bent and kissed again and again that radiant face; then, sitting on the floor by the couch, with Cuff huddled close, she touched lightly the high peaks that lay between the parting and this home-coming, but Doris, with that deep understanding, followed laboriously, silently, through the dark valleys.

“I’m rather battered and cropped, Aunt Dorrie—­but here I am!”

With this Joan tossed off her hat and voluminous coat.

“Your—­hair, Joan?  Your beautiful hair!”

“I have been very sick, Aunt Dorrie, my hair and my fat had to go—­just enough bones left to hold my soul.  But I’m all right now.”

“Don’t be sorry for me,” Joan was pleading, “I’m the gladdest thing alive to-day.  I’ve dropped all the old husks; I’ve found out just what they are worth, but some of them that seem like husks, dear, are not—­I’ve learned that, too.”

“Yes, Joan—­and now go on, in just your own way.  For a little while I have you to myself.  Nancy will take lunch at Uncle David’s new bungalow.”

There was a good deal of explanation necessary in dealing with Sylvia’s part in the past—­Doris had banked on Sylvia.  The tea room was easier, but Joan slipped over that experience so glibly that Doris made a mental reservation concerning it.

Patricia was the critical test.  At the mention of her name Cuff whined pathetically, and Joan bent and gathered him in her arms.

“I—­I can’t talk much about Pat, dearie, not now”; Joan bent her head; “she was so wonderful.  Just a beautiful, lost spirit in the world—­trying to find its way home.  There was only one way for Pat—­I shall always be glad that I could go part of it with her.”

“Yes, yes—­I am glad, too!” Doris whispered, for she had caught up with Joan now.  She did not know all that lay in the valleys—­but she felt the chill and darkness through which her child had come up to the light.  Strange as it might seem, she was thinking of that time, long ago, when she had escaped from the Park and had touched life in the open.

The hospital experience Joan could describe with a touch of humour that eventually brought a smile to Doris’s face.  She took for granted that it had been in Chicago, and when Joan told of flitting away from the young doctor who had saved her, Doris laughingly said: