He was glad when the sun came and filled the valley, panoramic from the farmhouse ridge, with a glory of light. Milk-white clouds capped the western hills. Nearer, dotted peacefully with farms, red barns and dark, straggling clumps of evergreen, the rolling valley stretched unevenly among intersecting lines of trees. At the foot of a hill rose the spire of the village church. To the south a crystal blaze of sun showed water.
A world of lilac and dogwood and a few late apple blossoms clinging bravely through the storm to sunshine. And the world held Joan with shadows of the sun in her hair and eyes and shadows of the past in her gowns.
Ah, truly, it was good to be alive!
CHAPTER VIII
JOAN
Thus, warm and fragrant, the summer came with Kenny in the house of Adam Craig, drifting pleasantly he knew and cared not where; with Brian on the road with Donald West.
And Joan? To her summer came with a new incomprehensible delight. Out of the void a bright spirit had roved into her world, sweeping her, eager and unresistant, into youth and life and laughter. He came from an immensity of romantic experience, holding out his hands to her, with tender eyes and a look of youth and charm and understanding in his vivid face.
She had fought through drab and solitude to dreams and formless craving, this girl of the hills. What things of vigor her life had known were cruel: a passionate shrinking from her uncle, a fear for the brother who had hotly rebelled at the meager life around him, a loneliness aloof from her kind and a vague hunger for some fuller, sweeter life beyond the hills. And with a blast of a horn the drab had vanished.
There were times when the girl's soft eyes opened wide in a panic of incredulity. He was a famous painter, this Irishman who had prevailed upon her in a laughing moment to call him Kenny; a famous painter with a personality as vivid as his face. And yet he chose to linger at her uncle's farm. The color, the gayety, the sparkle, he seemed miraculously to infuse into existence, left her breathless and startled. And he knew not one spot and one land. He knew many spots, some wild and remote, and many lands. Joan marveled at the twist of Fate that had brought him to the willow.