For a moment something in Joan shrank, then she raised her face. "Yes. Good-night--brother Ken." For another moment they stood silent. Then: "What was it that made you so hard at dinner, Joan, and makes you so sweet now?" "Ken, I thought that you--had not tried to find out about me--after that night!" "Did the mere going back really matter?" "It meant everything, Ken." "How?" "Oh! can you not understand? If you had just--not cared I would have been afraid to-night for Nancy! Ken, I believe you went back to pay for all our folly--had I been willing to accept; had I--cared in the way--you suspected." "Yes, Joan. I would have." Raymond said this solemnly. "That's what I went for." "And you should not have paid! Girls--must not--let others pay more than is owed--I've learned that, Ken. But it was the going back that made it--right for you to--go on. Ken, for Nancy's dear sake I am glad it was--you and I!" "For that I thank God!" Again Raymond bent his head. This time his lips fell on the open palms of the hands with those lines in them--lines like his own! "Some day you are going to be happy, Joan." "I am happy now. I was never happy, really, before. You see, I was always looking for myself in the past; now I think I have found myself--rather a dilapidated self, but mine own. It's going to be very interesting, this getting acquainted, and"--here Joan was thinking of the last day in the hospital and the rooms opening to the sweet singer--"and I'm going to touch and feel life instead of merely looking out through my own small door. And so--good-night." She was gone as she had come--not stealthily, but noiselessly; not afraid, but cautious. CHAPTER XXV "_This shall be thy reward--the ideal shall be real to thee._" Doris and Joan were in the living room of Ridge House trying to make things look "as usual" in the pathetic way people do after a loved one has gone forth never to return in quite the same relation. Doris paused by Nancy's loom and touched gently the unfinished pattern. "Dear little Nan," she said; "she used to make such dreadful tangles, but she learned to do beautiful work. This is quite perfect--as far as the child has gone." Joan was on her knees polishing away at the fireboard. The smoke-covered wood with its motto she meant to restore. She looked up brightly as Doris spoke. Joan was accepting many things besides Nancy's going away as Raymond's wife; accepting them without question, without explanation, but with perfect understanding. She understood fully about David Martin and Doris--her heart beat quick at Martin's lifelong devotion; at Doris's withholding. She understood, too, she believed, why the coming to the South had been necessary--the look in Doris's eyes was the same that had haunted Patricia's--the look that holds the unfailing message.