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?" Joan twinkled. "Every man must decide that for himself," she replied with a charming turn of her head. "Every--man?" Raymond's face fell. "Certainly. You don't think you are the only man, do you?" "Well, the only one left in town." Raymond gave a little laugh and changed the subject. He had no intention of getting behind his companion's screen. With a wider conception of his path, he more diligently kept to the middle. After the first fortnight he even went so far as to arrange for business engagements, now and then, in order to keep his brain clear. Joan always met these empty spaces in her days with a keen sense of loss which she hid completely from Raymond. His business demands were offset by her skilfully timed escapes from the Brier Bush. She would either be too early or too late for Raymond, and so while he paid homage to his code, Joan appeared to make the code unnecessary. And the weather became hotter and moister and the moral and physical fibre of the city-bound became limper. After a week of not seeing each other Joan and Raymond made up for lost time by galloping instead of trotting along. "Stevenson and O. Henry couldn't beat this adventure of ours," Raymond exclaimed one evening, wiping the moisture from his forehead. "And I bet thousands of folks would think better of one another if----"