This was romance in an age when romance was supposed to be dead! Here they were, they two, nameless—for they decided upon remaining so—living according to their own codes; feeling more and more secure, as time passed, that they were safe and were wisely enjoying what so easily might have been lost had they been limited in faith.
"It's the line in our hands!" Raymond declared. "It means something, all right. Think what we must have missed had we been unjust to each other and ourselves."
Joan nodded.
The sun and the dust of the pleasant highway had blinded her completely by the end of a week.
Patricia was a missing quantity most of the time. Patricia had taken to the Sun Road, also, but with her eyes wide open. If Patricia ever turned aside it would be because she knew the danger, not because she did not.
She never explained her absences nor her private affairs to Joan. When she did appear at Sylvia's studio she was quiet and nervous.
"It's the heat," she explained. "I'm not hot, but I cannot get enough air to breathe."
Meanwhile, Sylvia was basking in success and cool breezes on the Massachusetts coast. Her letters had the tang of the sea.
And Raymond was always on hand, now, at the dinner hour. He was like a boy, and took great pride in his knowledge of just the right places to eat. Quiet, but not too quiet; good food, and, occasionally, good music, and if the night was not too hot, a dance with Joan which set his very soul to keeping time.
"Gee!" he said, after their first dance; "I wonder what you are, anyway? Do you do everything—to perfection?"