“Not necessarily that trail,” Martin was teasing.

“You’re all wrong, Uncle Davey, as far as most of them are concerned.  They’re young and love a good time and some of them have to learn a lot—­learn not to play on volcanoes.  But for downright, running-to-earth methods, look to such girls as Nan.  They have the tide with them.  Men, unless they’re there to be caught, better watch out!”

“Oh! come, child, don’t be sinister.”

“I’m not, Uncle David,” Joan’s eyes shone; she was thinking of Patricia; “but you, everybody, lose a lot if they do not really know the truth about women—­the real truth.”

“My dear,” David was quite serious, “I’m no longer hard or misjudging—­I was frightened at your aunt’s methods with you, but you’re proving me wrong every day.”

“You should have trusted her more, Uncle David.”

“Yes, you are right, in part.  I should have trusted her less—­in some ways.”

“About me?”

“No.  About herself.”  Martin flecked the ashes from his cigar.  “And now,” he said with a huge sigh that seemed to sweep all regrets before it, “go and wash your face!”

Joan ran away, and when she came back the room was empty and the honk-honk of Martin’s horn sounded down the river road.

Then, as often happens when one stands in an empty room, Joan was conscious of a supersensitiveness.  She, quite naturally, attributed it to the ordeal she was about to undergo—­the meeting with Clive Cameron and her late talk with Martin.  Must she always be on the defensive?  Must she always feel that her volcano had blown her up when really she had escaped by its light?

While there was a certain amount of pleasurable excitement in the meeting with Cameron, while it lacked all that her meeting with Raymond had held, still her past experiences were of so uncommon a nature that she could not contemplate them without nervous strain, and she wished that she might have had a longer reprieve before Cameron came.

“With nothing really to be ashamed of,” she thought, “I feel like a criminal dodging justice.  I wish something so big would come that I could lose myself in it.”

Then she walked to the window overlooking The Gap.

“It’s no easy matter, Joan my lamb!” almost it seemed as if it were Patricia speaking, “to tie both ends of the rainbow together.”  Joan smiled at her thought.

“Dear, dear old Pat!” she spoke the words aloud.  “The very thought of you—­braces me.”

Joan was still on the backward trail.  She did not often tread it, but when she did she always returned starry-eyed and brave-hearted.  That was her reward:  the reward that she could share with no one—­except as it helped her to live.

Presently she turned to her task of restoring the motto on the fireboard.  She worked vigorously, intently, and then leaned back to get a better view.

Suddenly, as if they were alive, the words emerged from the last sweep of the cloth.