ow
happy one can be, Mary, when one isn't afraid and just goes singing
ahead. I cannot sing like Joan, but I can scare away fears!"

Mary regarded the girl with a hungry craving in her eyes over which the
lids were drawn to a slit. There was a fierce intentness in the gaze:
the look of the runner who has almost reached the goal but hears his
pursuers close.

CHAPTER XVI

"_And they planted their feet on the 'Sun Road'._"

If the spring has a direct and concentrated effect upon a young man's
fancy, it must have equal effect upon a young woman's, else the man's
would perish and come to look upon the spring as the lean part of the
year. Joan had meant all she said when, in the strength and virtue of
her youth, she had drawn herself away from Kenneth Raymond and proudly
remarked:

"Certainly not! And I am not afraid."

Both statements were sincere and should have brought her peace and
satisfaction. They did neither.

Raymond had, apparently, taken her at her word, and sought other places
in which to appease his hunger, and Joan turned to Patricia, for Sylvia
was called out of town.

That dream of a frieze that had long smouldered in Sylvia's soul had
broken bounds and a rich man, erecting a summer home on the
Massachusetts coast, having seen some of Sylvia's work, had invited her
down to "talk over" the frieze idea.

"And he'll let me do it!" Sylvia had confided breathlessly to Joan as
she packed her suitcase. "I can always tell when a thing is going to
come true. Now if I had shown him sketches he might not have taken
me--but when I can _talk_ my pictures all along the walls of his big,
sunny room it will be another matter.

"Blue background"--Sylvia was forgetting Joan as she rambled on,
punching and jamming her clothing into the case--"and a bit of a story
running through the frieze--a kind of sea-nymph search for the Holy
Grail--stretching from the door back _to_ the door. Can't you see it,
Joan?"

Joan could not. She was seeing something else. Something daily becoming
visualized. A seeking, yearning desire issuing from her soul and trying
to find--what?

"You'll have Pat here?" suddenly asked Sylvia. "I'd rather have someone
besides Pat, but the others are either away or worse than Pat. You're
good for Pat if she isn't for you. You sort of stiffen her up--she told
me so. Pat needs whalebone. When her purse gets flat her morals dwindle;
mine always get scared stiff. I'll write twice a week, Joan