She held her little slim hand out for it, her face sparkling. His were the long, slender, square-tipped fingers of the typical "surgeon's hand," smooth and strong. But Joy's hands were little for her build, which was not large, and the ring slid down her engagement finger till she had to anchor it with a little gold band from the other hand, pushed down over it.

"I'll take very good care of it, and polish it before I give it back to you," she assured him.

He answered her on a sudden boyish impulse.

"I don't want you to give it back to me. You're to keep it.... It can be your wishing ring that you said I brought you, Joy."

She smiled down at it, loose on her finger.

"Why, so it is—my wishing ring!" she sighed happily. She turned it about her finger, and he saw her lips move. She was wishing. He wondered what, but she did not offer to tell him.

"I wish that he may have the thing he wants the very most in all the world," she was saying fervently under her breath. When she was done she rose from the leaves, and he sprang up beside her.

"There's one more ceremony," he told her, half-amusedly. "Even for a four days' engagement, to make it quite legal—" He bent toward her, smiling.

"Oh—oh, should we?" stammered Joy, her wild-rose color deepening to rose-red.

"I really think we should," said John solemnly. It was the nearest to teasing any one he had come for a long time, and he found himself rather enjoying it. Besides, in his heart lurked the feeling that the child ought to realize that she might have let herself in for a good deal, if she hadn't fallen into merciful hands. He was a little ashamed of himself at the sweet way she took it. She merely held herself quite still and serious, and lifted her face a little.

John was a young man who always went through with anything he had begun, and he bent over and kissed Joy, very lightly.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"I—I didn't mind," said Joy, trying to make him happy, for she saw he was sorry, though she didn't know why or what for.

"You dear child!" he said. "Well, I won't do it again. I was teasing you, and I shouldn't. Come, we ought to go now."

She fell into step beside him, still mystified, but very much obliged to him in general, and they went back to the bungalow and congratulations side by side.

Meanwhile two very much surprised young people confronted two still perturbed old ones in the sunset on Phyllis' veranda.

"Now why do you suppose," Allan demanded of the world in general, "Johnny didn't break the news to us? I've rarely known a man who liked secrets less. He hasn't even come over and looked radiant with his mouth shut, as a normal human being would."

Phyllis picked up Angela and gazed over her head as she considered. She had a way of using Angela as most women do knitting or embroidery: as something to have in her hands when she wanted to think.

"It was certainly a case of very silent emotion," she said contemplatively.

"What was there a case of, Mother?" demanded Philip, reappearing, very dusty, and climbing up on all of her that Angela didn't occupy, thereby damaging fatally the spotlessness of her crinkled white silk skirt. "Is it something to eat? Did Johnny bring—"

"Johnny brought the rather surprising news that he and Joy are going to be married," his mother informed him, kissing the back of his neck. She spoke to him, as she always did, in a manner entirely unedited for children. If he didn't always know the long words, as she said, so much the better—his growing intelligence was stretched a little hunting them up.

The growing intelligence was certainly excited now.

"Married?" inquired Philip indignantly, voicing the feelings of the entire party. "Well, I think it would of been politer to have let us know before they spoke to each other about it!"

It was no time to feed either of the children, and their nurse would have been horrified, but Allan produced a box of marshmallows from behind a jardiniere before anything more was said.

"Here, my dear son," he said politely. "You deserve them for saying that. 'Them's our sentiments,' too, only we hadn't quite decided how to put it. Now go off and die happily, and only give Angela two."

Philip returned thanks automatically, clutched the box and fled before any one should interfere to revoke this wonderful gift from Heaven. Angela wriggled her small, blue-overalled body down and went in passionate pursuit.

"Now, you mustn't worry about it," Phyllis said to Mrs. Havenith, rising with one of her swift, graceful movements and putting both arms about the disconsolate old lady. "John Hewitt is one of the best men I ever knew. He's a rock of defense. Indeed, you may trust him with Joy. Allan has known him since they were in college together, and he has been our closest friend since our marriage. He's—why, he's nearly as nice as Allan, and that's saying all I can say. Isn't he, Allan?"

"As nice as I am?" said Allan, laughing and coming nearer to them. "That would be difficult, you know, Phyllis! But, seriously, Mrs. Havenith," he went on more gravely, "you can trust Hewitt to make Joy very happy. He's one of the best fellows I ever knew. And he is amply able to take care of Joy, if that is worrying you."

"He's perfectly adorable to his mother, too," Phyllis interposed; "and she's that marvelous thing, a mother who wishes her son would marry. You don't know what a lot there is in that!"

"True," said Allan teasingly, in a tone too low for any one but his wife to hear; "it can't be carried too far, as I have reason to know."

Phyllis had been rather unusually her mother-in-law's choice—indeed, the late Mrs. Harrington had done a good deal more in the business than she had any right to, and only Phyllis' own sweetness and common sense and the fact that Allan and Phyllis fell in love after their marriage had justified what old Mrs. Harrington did in the case. And when it did turn out properly she was not there to see, having died as soon as she had gotten her son (who was then, as every one thought, hopelessly paralyzed) safely married.

Phyllis broke off to say swiftly, under her breath, "I'll be even with you for that, Allan Harrington!" and went on trying to console the Haveniths; for poor Mr. Havenith sat, dignified and forlorn, trying to look perfectly omniscient and satisfied and not succeeding a bit.

After repeated assurances the Haveniths seemed a little happier, and went back to their bungalow to dress for dinner. The Harringtons sank back in their chairs with a sigh of relief apiece.

"I don't care if Philip eats every marshmallow on earth, I'm not going to stir till I've talked it over with you, Allan," said his wife determinedly.

She looked so pretty as she said it that Allan rose from his chair, tipped her chin back and kissed her.

"So she should gossip if she wanted to," he told her teasingly, dropping back into his own chair before she could object, if she had wanted to. "Go on, my dearest; say all the things you wouldn't say before the Haveniths. I'm perfectly safe."

"Yes, thank goodness, you are," acknowledged his wife. "Telling you things is like dropping them down a deep black well, which is a great comfort to a confiding person like myself. Well, then, if you insist on knowing what my lower nature thinks of this performance, it's my opinion that Joy and Johnny both ought to have their ears boxed. I don't believe in corporal punishment as a rule, but if there ever was a time for it—"

"In Philip's words," suggested her husband, "it would have been politer to have told us before they made up their minds!"

Phyllis laughed.

"I confess I rather agree with him," she said. "It was a little shock. Just the same, I never came across any one sweeter or prettier or more attractive than Joy, and it certainly is a comfort to know that John's wife will be some one I can be friends with without a struggle. You never can tell what a man's going to marry."

Allan arose and walked up and down meditatively, his golden-brown eyes fixed on the dulling sunset. He had spent several of his years lying on his back, as the result of an automobile accident in his early youth, and since he had been given back the use of his limbs he never kept still unnecessarily. He had arrears to make up, he said.

Phyllis watched him striding back and forth, tall and graceful, and forgot all about Joy's love-affairs. For the moment, watching his grace of movement lovingly, she was back in the days that had seemed so happy then, but were so much less happy than these, when they had had their first glad certainty that he would entirely recover. It had taken less than six months from the time he first stood, before he could walk easily, and another six before he could go back to horseback—tennis and swimming had been later still. It seemed sometimes to them both as if it had all been a dream, so active and untiring he was now.

"Heaven has been good to us," she said irrelevantly, but earnestly, looking up at him.

"Heaven's been good to me, I know," Allan said tenderly. "I have the best and sweetest girl in the world to spend my life with me..."

"John would disagree with you," said Phyllis, smiling up at him nevertheless, and flushing. "Allan, did it strike you that John would have been just as well pleased if Joy hadn't broken the news to Grandfather right then?"

"Johnny's like Talleyrand; you'd never know it from his expression if some one kicked him from behind.... Not that I'd like to be the kicker."

"So if he looked surprised, which he certainly did," pursued Phyllis decisively, "he was quite surprised, not to say upset."

"Oh, not as bad as all that," said Allan, who was not given to analysis. "I say, Phyllis, we really ought to go off and see if the children aren't dying under a tree somewhere."

"They are not," said the children's mother firmly. "You know Angela is much more under Philip's thumb than she is yours or mine or Viola's, and he's a martinet where she's concerned. She'll never get more than her legal two marshmallows, and a boxful won't hurt him."

"You're such a blessing, Phyllis," he answered irrelevantly. "Before the children came I used to wonder a little whether they wouldn't get in the way of my enjoyment of your society; but you didn't die and turn into a mother one bit. You've just added it on, like a sensible girl."

"Well, of course I'm attached to the babies," said Phyllis, who would have died cheerfully for either of them, "but you'd naturally come first. And they're much happier than if I were one of those professional mothers who can't discuss anything but croup.... Allan, it's time we began putting up triumphal arches. Here they are."

Allan began to whistle "Here Comes the Bride" softly and profanely under his breath, as Joy and John Hewitt neared them, but Phyllis managed to stop him before he was audible.

"She is a darling, isn't she?" Phyllis whispered, as she stood on the steps with one hand on Allan's arm. "Look at her, Allan—she looks like a strong little Rossetti angel! Oh, I'm so glad it's happened!"

She ran impulsively down the steps to greet them, her hands outstretched.

"I am so glad!" she said sincerely. "I don't believe anything nicer could have happened, even if we weren't notified!" She put one arm around Joy, giving the unoccupied other hand to John Hewitt. "And I think it's specially nice of you to stay with me instead of with Mrs. Hewitt, my dear."

Joy looked up at Hewitt appealingly. She was already beginning to feel that he was to be depended on to see her through things.

"I think Mother will want her innings sooner or later," he said. "But we haven't really told either of you all about it. You shall have the whole thrilling tale in the train. Suspend judgment on us both till then, please."

"Oh, there isn't any judgment," Phyllis answered gaily. "You needn't try to get out of your engagement on our account, either of you. The Harrington family registers entire satisfaction, doesn't it, Allan?"

"We're both awfully glad, old man," said Allan for his part.

Joy wondered, her heart beating with excitement, if they would mind very much when they heard the truth.... But such kind people as the Harringtons couldn't be very angry!

She was beginning to feel irrevocably engaged.... Never mind—John Hewitt would see her through. She looked up at him, and he smiled down on her.

"Let's all have dinner sent over here," suggested Phyllis brilliantly, "to celebrate. We'll have Viola go over to the hotel for your grandparents."

But Grandfather, it appeared, had gone to bed to rest from his excitement, and Grandmother, of course, was staying with him. So the four of them ate together in the little green living-room of the bungalow, talking and laughing happily. Joy, between Allan and John, spoke very little. But she felt so contented and so in the midst of things that she did not need to talk. She gleamed and shone like a jewel or a flower, smiling and answering happily when she was addressed: and John, looking at her, felt that his four days' protectorate was going to be perfectly simple and easy to endure.



CHAPTER FIVE

THE SHADOW OF GAIL

Joy spent most of the next morning talking to her grandparents—at least, they talked and she listened. Grandmother, now that the first shock was over, took the news with the same sweet and patient acceptance of people's behavior that forty-five years' sojourn among poets had taught her. The fact that Edith and Grace Carpenter were John Hewitt's aunt and mother appeared to comfort her a great deal. It made her feel less that Joy was marrying into a strange tribe.

Joy was pleased that this gave her grandmother relief. It was not till the day of departure that she discovered what awful thing more had been the result of the friendship. Indeed, it could have occurred to nobody, although, as John and she agreed afterwards, anybody should have seen what was going to happen!

For the remaining days at the mountain inn there was little excitement. Joy kept close to Phyllis or her grandmother, and John enjoyed himself in what struck the Harringtons as being rather too much his usual way. It seemed to them that a little scheming to see Joy alone would have been more appropriate. But neither Phyllis nor Allan were given to being relentlessly tactful, or planning situations for people. They reasoned that if the others really wanted tete-a-tetes they could manage them without help; and doubtless would, once they were in the country. So peace and unruffledness reigned in a way that was most surprising, considering the real facts of the case. They continued, even in Joy's mind, till almost the last minute, when she stood on the platform of the resort station with Phyllis, Allan, John, the children, Viola, and the bulldog, awaiting their train.

Philip was having to be cheered and distracted: his tender heart was nearly broken over the fact that his beloved Foxy had to travel in the baggage-car, when he would have been so much happier in the bosom of his family. Philip could not be restrained from pleading the dog's cause at length with a fatherly baggageman whose heart he had quite won in four minutes.

"He has a green-plush chair at home that he always sits in, and nobody takes it away from him, not even company," he explained earnestly. "He isn't used to baggage-cars—truly he isn't. He's a wonderful-mannered dog. And father says that if he lived up to his pedigree he wouldn't 'sociate wiv any of us. You can see he doesn't belong in a baggage-car!"

The baggageman, melted by Philip's ardent pleadings, was yielding to the extent of letting Foxy's family sit with him in relays and cheer him as much as they liked, when Grandmother dropped her bombshell. At least, that was what John called it when they talked it over afterwards. Joy always spoke of it as "the time Grandmother said the awful thing."

"Good-by, my little girl," she said. "I know Grace Carpenter's boy can't but be good to you. And, darling—she asked me to keep it for a surprise—I only heard this morning—but I know surprises aren't always pleasant—and you're so young, you need to be prepared. Grace wrote me she was greatly surprised by the news, though I'm sure she needn't have expected to be told if we weren't—but she was very sweet about it, and is giving a dance to all the nice people in Wallraven for you. It's set for the evening after you get there. She tells me she has arranged the invitations already, in a way that makes the short notice seem all right. Grace was always so ingenious.... Oh, there's the train—good-by, darling! Be a good girl!"

Joy was aghast.

"Grandmother!" she began. "Oh, Grandmother. I have to tell you! ... I—oh, John, tell her! I can't go! I—"

She turned to Hewitt despairingly. But he had not been listening: he had been watching the argument between Philip and the baggageman.

"Hurry, Joy, train's coming," was all he said, and caught her arm, whisking her aboard.

She pulled back, but that made no difference. He had her established in a seat, with what Phyllis called his "genial medical relentlessness," in spite of her appeals.

"But I can't go!" she protested weakly from her seat, as the train pulled out of the station.

"But, you see, you have," was John's placidly unanswerable reply, as he stowed his light overcoat on the rack above them and laid her coat over that with maddening precision. He smiled at her protectingly.

"Why, my dear child, what made you lose your nerve that way at the last minute?"

Then Joy understood that he had not heard the blow fall.

If it had been anybody but John she would have been much more embarrassed than she was, but by now she had come unconsciously to feel that when things went wrong John was the natural person to come to. He could always help her through them.

"Grandmother told me—" she began, then stopped. It was pretty hard to tell, after all.

"Go on," he told her encouragingly. "Grandmother told you what?"

"She told me that she wrote your mother, and your mother said—she said she wished we'd told her; but, anyway, she's sent out invitations for a big party—to meet me!"

It all came with a rush. She didn't dare to meet John's eyes after she had said it.

She heard his long, low whistle of astonishment, scarcely suppressed in time, and a lower, but quite as fervent, "Great Scott!" and then silence. It was not for a full minute that she dared look in the direction of his chair, which he had swung away when she had told him. She gave one quick glance, then another longer one. She could not see his face, but his shoulders were shaking.... Had it moved him so?

Joy was used, at Grandfather's, to hear of people being "moved."

"I didn't think John was the kind of a man to have emotions outside of him that way," she thought a little disappointedly, "but I suppose an awful thing like this—"

About then he turned himself toward her. He was laughing!

"Do you think it's funny?" she demanded.

"Funny?" replied John Hewitt, still laughing desperately, and trying quite as desperately to do it quietly enough to prevent the descent of the others, wanting to know what he was laughing at. "I think it's one of the funniest things that ever happened. Talk about Nemesis—if ever a punishment fitted the crime, this does!"

Joy sighed relievedly. At least, he wasn't being angry about it, and he might very well have been. She glanced out the window, which, like the windows of most New England cars in summer, had evidently been closed ever since John Hancock died, and glued in place. Then suddenly the thing struck her as funny, too. They were in for it, and by their own act. She began to laugh with him, quite forgetting that she had more explanations before her, and as a really honorable girl had no alternative but going back to Grandmother with her sins on her head.

"Oh, it is ridiculous," she gasped. "I feel as if I'd kidnapped you and couldn't dispose of you.... We really must stop laughing, or the others will come down on us to know what we're laughing at."

"You won't be able to dispose of me till the visit's over, at any rate," John answered her, sobering a little. "My mother and your grandmother have settled that for us effectually."

Joy sat bolt upright and faced him.

"You mean you're going to let it go on?"

"Why, of course I'm going to let it go on," said he matter-of-factly. "What else can we do about it?"

Joy's heart gave a spring of happiness. She wouldn't miss her visit, after all!

"We can find out that we don't like each other, and break off the day you go home. I'll come back from the train very sad," he told her.

"Thank you very much," she said happily. "I thought I was going to have to confess to every one and go back to Grandmother. I'm very glad I needn't."

"You poor kiddie!" he said, as he had said the first time he met her. "Well, on this particular point all you have to do is remember what Beatrice Fairfax says, 'Never explain and never confess, and you'll be respected and admired by all.'"

"It sounds like getting admiration and respect under false pretenses," Joy answered doubtfully. But she dimpled as she said it and looked up sideways at John under her black eyelashes.

The effect was so unexpected and pretty that it set John wondering why she didn't do it oftener. Suddenly a probable reason dawned on him. When John Hewitt discovered anything wrong it was his prompt habit to right it, and he did so now.

"See here, child, I can't have you being afraid of me," he said peremptorily. "When I told you I was a trial fiance, I didn't mean that I was to be less of a fiance than a trial. If we're going to be theoretically engaged for a month, we'll have to be friends, at least, and friends trust each other, and know they can ask each other to do anything they want. They know, too, that they never need be afraid of either being angry at the other."

"Then I'm to take it for granted that you feel as friendly toward me as I do toward you?" she asked.

"Why, naturally," he answered. "That's friendship."

"It sounds much nicer than anything I ever heard about in my life," said Joy enthusiastically. "But—are you sure I'm not the one that's going to be more of a trial than a fiance? I—I don't want to be a bother, you know."

"If you are, I'll tell you," he promised.

"All right," said Joy contentedly, "and I promise not to have my feelings hurt a bit."

She felt quite unafraid of him by now, as he had intended, for they had been talking together as if they were exactly the same age—or, rather, Joy thought, as if nobody had any age at all.

"Do you know," she told him confidentially, "I did want a lover, back there at home. A real one, I mean. I saw a girl with one, and you could tell there wasn't anything on earth so nice as being lovers. But this is lots better—all the nice part of it and none of the stupid part—for I suppose they were going to be married."

John looked at her curiously.

"Joy, did you never have a friend of your own age, or any companions but those old people of yours?"

She shook her head, smiling.

"Never any."

"That accounts for you, I suppose," said he with a sigh, which puzzled Joy very much. She had accepted as gospel John's order not to be afraid of him; and she was talking to him as if he were confidant, father and sister, all in one. That it might be treatment a very attractive man wasn't used to never dawned on her, because she had nothing to check up by.

"Do I need accounting for?" she inquired, with another of the sidelong smiling glances he approved of.

She really wanted to know, but she was so contented with life as it was then that she did not feel particularly distressed over it. Her trial lover took another look at her and decided that perhaps she didn't need to be accounted for, after all. She was wearing the little golden-brown suit she clung to, with its little cap to match, and her cheeks were flushed with the heat of that September day. It was as interesting to watch her develop one and another little way, he decided, as it would have been to observe an intelligent child.

That there was some slight difference in his mind between her and a bona fide intelligent child was proved by that fact that he would just as lief that Philip had not interrupted them just then: though the interruption was done with all Philip's natural grace.

He was mussed and rather dusty, and the front of his blue Oliver Twist suit bore an unmistakable paw-mark on its bosom.

"John," he said earnestly, "if you don't hurry, Foxy will have been alone quite a while. Mother says I mustn't stay wiv him any longer, and he doesn't seem to think brakemen is people a bit."

Joy gave a little gurgle of laughter. It reminded her of Mr. James Arthur Gosport and how he loved brakemen. How shocked he would have been at the pedigreed Foxy! She began to tell John about it, then stopped herself.

"But you want to go and sit with the dog," she said, as they laughed over it; for Philip was standing, silent and reproachful, till John should do his duty by the beloved animal.

"I don't want to a bit," said John frankly, "but I suppose my reputation with Foxy demands it."

He rose reluctantly, quoting from the "Bab Ballads":

"My own convenience counts as nil: It is my duty, and I will!"

"Come out on the rear platform," said Phyllis, joining Joy as she stared after the tall figure and the little one passing out of the car. "It's the only cool spot. I suppose in the smoking car, where Allan is, the windows are open, but this place is too hot to live in. I wonder if there's any blue-law that forbids opening chair-car windows. I always forget to tell Allan to get day-coach tickets on this line, and it never occurs to him to do anything but perish in the parlor-cars, having been brought up in the lap of luxury. So we suffer on."

Phyllis laughed as she led the way out to the little platform, and held to the rail with one hand, letting the wind sweep past her. She looked like anything but suffering.

"Oh, isn't it one of the loveliest days that ever was!" she breathed, turning to Joy.

"It's one of the loveliest times that ever was," Joy responded impulsively. "Oh, Phyllis, I'm so glad I met you!"

"Glad you met John, dear child," Phyllis corrected. "So am I. Glad I met you, I mean, and particularly glad John did. We were all so afraid he was going to marry Gail Maddox. I think he was getting a little worried over it himself!"

Joy looked up, startled.

"You mean—he wasn't really thinking of marrying some one else?"

Phyllis anchored her hat more securely, and smiled down out of the white cloud her veil made around the rose and blue and gold of her.

"He seems principally to have been thinking, in his monumental silence, of marrying you. But Gail was certainly 'spoken of for the position.'"

"Gail!" Joy murmured worriedly.

She had never thought of this complication.

Phyllis nodded.

"She's as nice as possible, but everybody could see how fearfully they wouldn't fit—everybody, that is, but the parties concerned. Gail's one of those people who are always dashing about aimlessly, doing something because she didn't do it yesterday. And John's the kind of a man—well, you know the kind he is: dependable, authoritative, angel-kind, and deadly clever. He's not a bit like Allan," said Allan's wife, as if Allan were the standard pattern for men. "If I didn't adore Allan too much to be so mean, I could fool him a dozen times a day, and so could any woman. If it meant John's life I don't believe I could hoodwink him, any more than I could another girl. I suppose it comes from diagnosing cases."

"We're almost at Wallraven, Phyllis," Allan spoke from behind them before Joy could answer. "Better come in and get your caravan in order."

"Coming," said Phyllis simply; and went in to assort her babies.

But Joy had seen the look that passed between the husband and wife, and it made her a little lonely for the moment. You could see that they belonged to each other, and how glad they were of it. And Joy—well, she was only somebody's pretend-sweetheart. Maybe nobody would ever look at her that way...

She clasped her hands together as she always did when she thought hard, and felt the touch of her wishing ring. Her heart lightened, for she remembered how kind John had been to her. Surely he couldn't pretend to be so pleased about it if he weren't. And if there was another girl, why, she was only having John borrowed from her.

"It won't hurt her a bit," Joy decided. "And if she really is flyaway, and all that, maybe a little anxiety will be good for her."

In Joy's heart, too far down for her to find it herself, was a tiny bit of defiance, and the old, old feeling, "If she wants him, let her come and get him!" But she wasn't in the least aware of it, and went back to her seat feeling like an angel.

She found there John, looking perfectly content with life, gathering up her belongings and his, and obviously expecting to make her his complete care. When John Hewitt took charge of anybody they were taken charge of all over; not fussily or so it was a nuisance, but just comfortably, so that every care vanished.

They got off the train, into the peace and spaciousness of open country. The station was behind them, a little, neat stone station like a toy dropped down on the old-fashioned New England countryside. Joy caught her skirts clear of the car steps and descended, John guarding her. She smiled down at him before she sprang to the platform, and he smiled up at her. To any one not in the secret they seemed like as real lovers as possible.

As Joy stood there, waiting a moment, she felt arms coming round her from behind, and, turning, startled, she found herself in the embrace of a tall, white-haired woman with John's kind steel-gray eyes and an impulsiveness not at all like John's.

"This is the first chance I have ever had to kiss my daughter," said a swift, soft-noted voice—not at all like an old lady's—"and I've been wanting one for thirty-odd years. I'm John's mother, my dear, and I forgive you both on the spot for keeping me in the dark. I know just why John did it. He didn't want parties given over him, as he's always saying. But I've foiled him completely... My dear, he's picked me out exactly the sort of thing I wanted!"

Joy kissed Mrs. Hewitt back willingly. This was just the kind of mother she had always wanted, too. She spoke out what she thought, before she thought.

"Are you Grandmother's Grace Carpenter?" she asked. "Why, you're not a bit old!"

Her mother-in-law laughed as she turned to greet her son, still holding fast to one of Joy's hands.

"I know you don't like being kissed in public, Johnny, but you know I always do it, anyhow. You good boy, to actually tell her I liked having my first name used! He never would do it, you know, Joy, dear. Phyllis and Allan—where are those two? I have their motor, commandeered it to come down in. Mine had the fender bitten off by the village trolley last night. Oh—they're putting in the children."

Joy had scarcely time to answer, but she let her mother-in-law sweep her along, and install her in the motor between herself and John, who was holding Angela because Angela insisted.

As they sped down the country lanes Joy sat very still, trying to forget that this happy time would ever stop. Giving up John was bad enough—maybe he would be friends with her afterwards if she was lucky—but giving up John's mother seemed almost too much to ask of any girl.

"I'm sure I'll never happen on a mother-in-law like this again!" thought Joy.

"How's Gail, Mother?" she heard John ask quite calmly as they turned down another leafy lane.

She flushed up, deep rose-red, as she listened for the answer.

"Just back from the city, and more rambunctious than ever," said Mrs. Hewitt briskly.

Joy clasped her hands over the wishing ring and looked off—anywhere—not to look at John or his mother. And in her anxiety she heard a husky whisper from the seat behind her, where Viola was restraining Philip and Foxy from jumping out into the landscape.

"Don't you fear, honey. Mighty hard work getting a man away from a red-haired girl!"

Where her courage came from Joy did not know. But as she heard Viola she sat up straight. And a light came into her eyes—the light of battle.



CHAPTER SIX

ROSE GARDENS AND MEN

"You can come in by the front door, if you'd rather be grand," offered Phyllis, "but the only door we can coax the car anywhere near is the side one. And we had to cut that through."

They halted at a contented-looking old Colonial house set far back from the country road. The grounds were large, and one whole side of them was shut off from the road by a high Sleeping Beauty sort of hedge that hid everything except one inquisitive red rose, sticking its head out between masses of box. The other side of the house was surrounded by a green lawn set with tall old trees. A tennis-court showed at the back, and closer by a red-banded croquet-mallet lay beneath a tree, with a red ball nestling to it. The whole place looked sunny and leisurely and happy and spacious and welcoming.

As the motor, after teetering itself cautiously down a side path that had never in the world been made for motors, stopped, the side door Phyllis had referred to opened, and a beautiful white wolfhound sprang out and into the car, where he was welcomed tumultuously by the children, and greeted without undue enthusiasm by Foxy, whose disposition had not yet recovered from the baggage car.

Every one piled out, and Philip and the dogs raced back into the house and to the greetings of a couple of half-visible colored servants.

Phyllis, alighting more leisurely, turned, with the graciousness that was peculiarly hers, and smiled from the doorway at Joy.

"Welcome, my dear," she said. "And I hope you'll never go away from our village for good again!"

Joy's throat caught a little. She was only a pretender, a little visitor in this Abode of the Blest. But, anyway, the Abode of the Blest was here for a while, and she in it. She looked from Phyllis' kind, lovely face in the doorway to John, beside her on the step. His face was as kind as Phyllis' and as handsome in its grave way. For a month she was going to be happy with them, and she could save up enough happiness, maybe, for remembering through years of life in the twilight city house. She was here, and loved and free and young. Lots of people never got any happiness at all. Joy knew that from the way she heard them talk. They seemed to mean it usually. A whole month, then, was lots to the good. She would take every bit there was of it—yes, love and all!

She put her two hands in Phyllis' impulsively, and kissed her as they went in. The others followed.

Philip, gamboling rejoicingly about the house with his dear dogs, bounded toward her as she made her way toward the stairs.

"I got something to ask you when you get your face washed and come down," he called to her. "'Member to 'mind me."

"All right!" she called back heedlessly, as she followed Mrs. Hewitt up the wide, shallow-stepped staircase. Mrs. Hewitt seemed to have constituted herself a committee of welcome, and was accepted on all sides as being about to stay to dinner.

All the rooms in the house were sunny, and at the window of Joy's there tapped a spray from a rambler rose. There was so much to see and hear and smell out the window that Joy had a hard time getting dressed. She put back on her gray silk. Grandmother had packed all the pretty picture-frocks for her, but she didn't feel as if she could stand wearing any of them yet; but she was beginning to think that these people supposed she had only two dresses. To tell the truth, she was getting a little tired of wearing first the gray and then the brown and then doing it over again. But she pinned the spray of roses that had tempted fate by sticking itself in her window, on the bosom of her dress, and ran down.

She found that, much as she had looked out the window, she was earlier than the others. Phyllis and Allan were nowhere to be seen, and Mrs. Hewitt she knew was above stairs yet, because she had heard her singing to herself as she moved about the next room. Philip, exempted from an early bedtime by special dispensation and the knowledge that he wouldn't go to sleep this first night, anyway, was being wisely unobtrusive in a corner of the room, spelling out a fairy-book. The only other occupant of the room, Joy saw, was her trial fiance.

It was the first time she had been all alone with John since their talk in the wood. He had been sitting on the floor by Philip, explaining to him some necessary fact about the domestic habits of dragons. He made a motion to rise when she came in.

"Oh, please don't get up!" she begged.

She had been embarrassed when she first saw him, the only occupant of the room (for small children are most mistakenly supposed not to count); but, curiously enough, when she saw that he was a little embarrassed, too, her own courage rose, and she came over quite at her ease, sinking down at the other side of the convenient Philip.

"You asked me to remind you of something you wanted to say to me, Philip," she said.

Philip looked up from his book amiably.

"Yes, there was," he said encouragingly, if somewhat vaguely. "Thank you for aminding me. I just wanted to find out—if you're sure you don't mind telling me—why you never make a fuss over John. You know, people that marry each other do. I saw two once—ever so long ago, but I know they did. Lots."

Joy blushed, but when you've come to Arcady for only a month, and it really doesn't matter afterwards, you're very irresponsible.

"Why, you see, Philip, the girl isn't supposed to start making the fusses. You'd better ask John about it—some other time—" she added hastily.

But as she spoke she had to hold her lips hard to keep them straight, and looked out of the corner of one black-lashed eye at John, sitting at his ease on Philip's other side. She had never found him at a loss, and she desired, most unfairly, to see what he would do with this impertinence.

"Why don't you, John?" inquired Philip inevitably.

Joy had been so sure John would get out of it with his usual immovable poise that her own remarks hadn't occurred to her in the light of provocation. But Dr. Hewitt evidently looked at it that way, because what he said was quite terrifyingly simple:

"If you'll move a little, Philip."

Philip courteously shoved himself back on the floor from between them, and for the second time in her life Joy found herself being kissed by a man.

"I didn't mean that you really had to start things right away," she heard Philip, dimly, explaining in a tone of courteous apology, "only when you wanted to, you know."

"It's all right, old fellow," John assured him kindly. "I didn't mind."

It was, indeed, quite a brotherly kiss, but even at that—and in the resigned way John had explained it there was little room for a girl's being excited—Joy felt a little dazed. But she didn't intend to let John see it. She had rented him for the month, so to speak, and, though it hadn't specially occurred to her, probably this sort of thing was all in the month's work... It was as near as the wishing ring could bring her to a real lover...

She raised her surprising eyes to him demurely.

"Thank you," she said with all apparent gratitude. "It was sweet of you to do that for Philip."

There was no answer possible to that, as far as she knew.

"You needn't say anything," she went on placidly, but with that spark of excited mischief still in her eyes. "Do you know, Dr. Hewitt, I'm getting to be much less afraid of you. You certainly have the kindest heart——"

Here the worm turned. He also got up off the floor, and stood over her, toweringly, as he answered.

"I haven't a kind heart one bit," he said—and was there a certain sharpness in his voice?—"kissing you isn't at all hard—"

"Compared to lots of messy things you have to do in the exercise of your profession?" finished Joy contemplatively, cocking her bronze head on one side, and looking up at him sweetly, her arms around her knees. "I know. I've read about them—I've read a lot. You have to give people blood out of your strong, bared right arm, and cure them of diphtheria, and scrub floors—oh, no, it's the nurses do that. 'A physician's life is not a happy one!'"

She laughed, as he stood severely there above her. She had not realized before that she knew how to tease anybody, least of all the demigod who had rescued her from the shadows of the reception-halls at home. But his kissing her had done something to her—it always seemed to, she reflected—and his matter-of-fact explanation of it had exasperated her to the point of wanting to pay him back.

"He might at least have said he liked it," she told herself petulantly. And then after she had laughed, she remembered that if he did anything too much—if she went too far—he could speak the word and send her flying out of fairyland... But he wouldn't do that. He was ever so much too noble, thank goodness!

"People who are noble, really are a comfort," she said cheerfully, aloud. "Dr. Hewitt, if you don't mind, my spray of roses got caught in your coat. Of course, if you really want it——"

He detached the spray with something like a jerk and dropped it down into her lap.

Really you could hardly blame a man for being annoyed a bit. To have a gentle, grateful little girl you had nobly helped, suddenly perk up and turn into something quite different—something dimpling and impish and provocative—would be disturbing to nearly any man.

John had no means of knowing, of course, that Phyllis had said anything about Gail Maddox, though he might have remembered, at least, that Joy had red hair and was likely to have a little of the fire that goes with it. He looked at her all over again, as if there was somebody else sitting on the floor where little Joy Havenith had been—somebody rather surprising. He began to wonder about this young person, with a distinct interest.

"We've found her!" announced Mrs. Hewitt, much to the surprise of the three in the dining-room, who had not lost anything.

She and Phyllis came in with a triumphant air, and Angela. Angela was in Phyllis' arms, and adorably asleep, with her goldy-brown lashes on her pink cheeks and a look of angelhood in every round, relaxed curve.

"Found her?" inquired John, turning from his position looking down at Joy. "Who was lost?"

"Do you mean to say," Phyllis demanded, "that you didn't know we'd lost Angela for the last half-hour?"

"Well, she got lost so very—er—noiselessly," apologized John, "that it escaped our attention. But she doesn't look as if it had worn on her much," he added, brightening.

"It didn't," Phyllis answered with an irrepressible laugh, "it wore on us! I expect Allan's still hunting the grounds over for her—he and the gardener. The gardener always uses a wooden rake with a pillow tied to its teeth."

Allan entered at one of the long windows as she spoke.

"Oh, you found her," he remarked. "I thought she wouldn't have been out of the house."

"Where was she?" demanded Philip, John, and Joy in a polite chorus, surrounding the center of attraction, who slept on.

"Under the guest-room bed," said Phyllis, putting her daughter down on a couch as she spoke, and going over to the table, where she struck the bell for soup, and sat down.

"I crawled under," interjected Mrs. Hewitt proudly, looking every inch a duchess as she said it, "and there she was! She had eaten every bit of cheese from the set mousetrap under it; I forgot to tell you, Phyllis."

"Good gracious!" said Phyllis as the rest sat down about the table.... "Well, if it hasn't hurt her so far, it mayn't at all. I'm not going to wake her out of a seraphic slumber like that just to ask her if she has a pain."

"You don't let me eat cheese at night," said Philip aggrievedly here, looking up from his plate. "And I knew that mousetrap was there, and I never touched a scrap of it. It was set the day we went away from the chickenpox."

"You're a very high-minded child," said his father soothingly.

"And there's charlotte russe for your dessert, Master Philip," whispered the waitress: at which Philip forgot his wrongs and brightened visibly.

The meal went on rather silently after this, because everybody was rather hungry. Philip grew drowsier and drowsier, till Viola stole in and led him away, "walking asleep." The grown people went on talking and laughing around the table.

"With nobody to hush them so he could make a literary criticism," Joy thought happily.

Mrs. Hewitt tore herself away with obvious reluctance, about ten or so, taking John with her. After that Phyllis said that she was sleepy, but not to let that make anybody else feel they had to be sleepy, too. Joy had been holding her eyelids up by main force for some time, because she hadn't wanted to miss any of the talk and laughter and delightful feeling of being grown up and in the midst of things. So she went up to bed, almost as drowsily as Philip had before her.

Just as she was on the point of dropping off to sleep, with the wind blowing, flower-scented, across her face, she remembered something that made her sit bolt upright in bed and think. There was going to be a grand affair for her at Mrs. Hewitt's house the very next night, and she hadn't a blessed thing to wear! Nothing, that is, but five art-frocks which she had determined in her heart never to wear again. But—the wind among the trees was very soothing, and the wishing ring lay loose and heavy on her finger.

"You'll look after it," Joy murmured drowsily to the ring, and went to sleep.

Philip wakened her the next morning. He was very clean and rosy from a recent bath, and he was curled on the quilt at her feet, staring intently at her.

"Did you know if you look hard at asleep folks' eyes they open?" he inquired affably. "You see they do. Yours did. Do you mind dogs on your bed, or Angela?"

Philip was always so perfectly friendly that Joy was very much at ease with him, which had never been her case before with children. But, then, she had never met any intimately before. She reached out a slim white arm from beneath the covers and pulled him down and kissed him—an operation which he bore with his usual politeness.

"I love dogs, and Angela," she told him. "And I don't mind them on the bed a bit, if your mother doesn't."

Philip assumed a convenient deafness as to the last clause, and whistled, whereat his slaves, Ivan, the white wolfhound, Foxy, and Angela, all appeared joyously and dashed across the floor, scrambling enthusiastically up on the white counterpane. They were almost too many for one three-quarters bed, and Joy, on whom most of the happy family was sitting, could have wished the dogs a little lighter, even while she gave Angela a hand up. Angela scrambled up with intense earnestness and loud little pantings, and, finally seated on a pillow in triumph, smiled broadly and charmingly, her golden head cocked to one side.

"Doggies went garden, 'is morning," she informed Joy, still smiling enchantingly. "Oo—a big hole!"

"She means they dug a hole," Philip translated. "You can't always tell when she's making up things that aren't so; but this is. It's there now, with worms in it, and a rosebush that fell in. But I washed all their paws in the bathtub," he added hastily, "and Angela's frock-front. Didn't I, Angel?"

"Fock-front!" said Angela, beaming and spatting herself happily in the region named.

Joy cast a wild look around her. Foxy lay across her at her waist line—yes, there were paw-marks all over the counterpane, and Ivan, who seemed to have had more than his share of the cleansing, showed a distinct arc of wetness where his long body had lain at the foot of the bed.

Philip, following her eyes, slid unobtrusively from her side.

"I—I just thought you'd like to see the dogs, and the baby," he explained. "Most people do. Mother sent me to tell you it was nine o'clock, and would you like to get up?"

He made no further references to paws or washings. He merely whistled again to Angela and the dogs, who were reluctant, but struggled obediently down from the counterpane, leaving, alas, distinct traces in all directions.

"If you frow the covers back nobody'll see anything," he hinted from the doorway, and was gone.

Joy did not take his hint. Instead, she pulled the counterpane off bodily and put it in the window to sun, and then went on dressing. Things were so cheerful and sunny and funny in this house.

"Oh, John was right," she thought buoyantly, as she braided her ropes of hair. "Things do come right if you hope and wish and know they will!"

The glitter of the ring caught her eyes, in the mirror, between the bronze ripples of hair, and it reminded her of one thing that was not settled: her frock for the evening, this wonderful evening when a party was going to be given for just her!

She asked Phyllis about it as soon as breakfast—a somewhat riotous meal—was over. She was a little diffident, because she was sure that any sane grown-up person who was told that there were five good frocks you hated would tell you you should wear them. But Phyllis only suggested bringing them down and looking them over. So they did.

"They all have queer things all over them that nobody else wears except illustrations in historical novels, and they're all of very good materials," said Joy sadly, laying them out one by one. "And there isn't one I don't hate to wear. But I never could explain that to Grandmother, of course."

She looked at Phyllis with a wistful hope in her eyes. Phyllis thoughtfully lifted the yellow satin skirts of Joy's pet detestation.

"This is a lovely material," she said thoughtfully. "Is it the color you don't like?"

"N-no," Joy answered doubtfully. "It's the make." Then she burst out passionately. "I want to look frisky!" she declared. "I want to be dressed the way John's used to seeing girls. I—I want to look just as pretty and like folks as Gail Maddox!"

She checked herself, flushing and biting her lip. She hadn't meant to say that!

But Phyllis took it beautifully.

"No reason why you shouldn't look just exactly like folks," she soothed. "This is lovely, too, this silver tissue. Goodness, what a lot of material there is in these angel sleeves!"... She held it up consideringly... "Wait a minute, Joy, I think I read my title clear." She ran out of the room, coming back in a moment with a life-size dress-form in her arms, which she set down.

"Here's Dora, the dress-model," she said cheerfully. "She adjusts." In proof she began to screw Dora down and in to required proportions, measuring her by Joy, who watched operations with fascinated eyes.

"I never knew you could sew," she said.

"My father was a country minister," Mrs. Harrington explained, flinging the green frock, inside out, over the steely shoulders of Dora, the dress-frame. "I cook very nicely, if I do say it myself, and till I was seventeen I did every bit of my own sewing."

"And were you married at seventeen?"

"No," Phyllis answered, stopping a moment from her pinnings and speaking more gravely. "My father died then, and I went to work. I hadn't time to sew after that—I bought ready-made things. So when I was married—that was a long seven years afterwards—I did have such lovely times buying organdies and laces and things and cutting them out and making them! That was the summer Allan was getting well."

She stared off at the wall for a moment, as she knelt up against the green satin. "That was the loveliest summer I ever had—excepting every one since."

She laughed a little, then prevented herself from further speech by putting a frieze of pins in her mouth and beginning to do something with the dress with them, one by one.

"Do you mind cutting into this?" she asked when that row was gone.

"The more the better!" said Joy with enthusiasm.

"It will make a stunning frock, with the silver net draped over the pale-green satin... M'm. That silver iridescent girdle on the other dress—the violet—can I have that, too?"

Joy ripped and handed with tremulously eager hands, while Phyllis swiftly cut away the sleeves of the green dress and slashed a decolletage, and draped the net over it and pinned on the girdle.

"Try if you can get into that without being scratched," she invited, lifting the frock gingerly off Dora and dropping it over Joy. Then she wheeled her around to where she could see her reflection in the tall pier-glass between the windows.

"Of course, that's rough," she told her; "but what do you think of it, generally? Are there any changes you want?"

"Oh, not one!" Joy replied ecstatically, regarding the slim little green and silver figure in the glass.

"It needs to be shorter," meditated Phyllis aloud, and fell to pinning it up to the proper shortness.

Joy continued to look at it rapturously. It had been a straight, long gown, and all Phyllis had needed to do was to drape it with the net ripped from the other dress and shorten and cut it into fashionableness. It was charming—springlike and becoming, and, best of all, strictly up to date!

"Don't you think you'll feel equal to being the feature of the reception in that?" demanded Phyllis. "I certainly should in your place.... That is, if you have silver slippers."

"I have, and I think I do," said Joy gravely.

"Then I'll hand this over to Viola to put the finishing stitches in. Look out the window—do you see anything familiar coming up the path?"

Joy, in her pinned finery, looked, then snatched her clothes from the sofa, where they lay in state, and ran upstairs. John was coming along the path, and she didn't want him to know about her frock till it was all done.

She came down a moment later, brown-clad and demure, and looking so young and harmless that any man would have been sure his tilt with her, of the night before, was a dream. She greeted him shyly, with her lashes down.

"Isn't—isn't it a little early for you to be away from your patients?" she asked.

"My morning office hours are just over, and I'm on my way to make some calls in the car. Want to come?" he asked.

"Thank you," said Joy. "That is, if you don't think I'd be in the way."

"If I thought you would be I wouldn't have asked you," said Dr. Hewitt matter-of-factly. "So run along and pin up your hair, child. I don't want people to think I've been robbing the cradle."

He smiled at her in a brotherly fashion, and Joy began to feel a little ashamed of herself for trying to tease him, even if he didn't seem to see it. She liked him so much, apart from any other feeling, that it was hard to be anything but nice and grateful to him—except when she thought of Gail Maddox.

"It just takes two hairpins," she informed him, coming over to him and holding up the ends of her braids. "You wind it round and pin it behind."

He took the hairpins and the braids, and quite deftly did as she asked him to.

"Hurry, my dear," he said authoritatively, yet with a certain note of affection in his voice that made Joy feel very comforted. As she flew to get her cap her heart gave a queer, pleasant sort of turn-over. His voice made her feel so belonging.

She sang as she went, and Phyllis and John smiled across at each other, as over a dear child.

"Oh, John, I'm so glad you chose such a darling!" said Phyllis warmly, putting her hands on his shoulders, as "A Perfect Day" floated back to them from above. "You know, Johnny, even the best of men do marry so—so surprisingly. She might have been—"

"'She might have been a Roosian, or French or Dutch or Proosian,'" he quoted frivolously. "Well, Phyllis, I'm glad you approve of my—ah—choice. How long do you think it will take it to get its hat on?"

"Oh, you can laugh," Phyllis answered him, "but I know you're proud of her, just the same."

"Well, she's creditable," said John unemotionally, but with a little smile beginning to show at the corners of his mouth.

"I'm ready!" called Joy breathlessly from the top of the stairs, and ran down tumultuously. "Oh, Phyllis, can't I have some roses to take to John's sick people—the poor ones? I want them to like me!"

"Help yourself." Phyllis granted promptly.

"Not a bit of it." John contradicted her coolly. "You must teach them to love you for yourself alone. Come on, kiddie."

He tucked her hand under his arm and hurried her, laughing, down the drive. Phyllis ran after them with a too-late-remembered motor-veil, which she managed to convey into the car by the risky method of tying a stone in it and throwing the stone. It just missed John, and Joy nearly fell out, turning to wave thanks for it.

John threw his arm around her hastily to hold her in, and so Phyllis saw them out of sight.

"You needn't do that any more," observed Joy as they sped on. "There's nobody can see us now."

"That, with most people," observed John amusedly, "would be a reason for continuing to do it."

"M'm," said Joy in assent, as he removed his arm. "You see," she went on rather apologetically, "I never was engaged before, not even this much, and I probably shan't always do it right.... Do you think I shall?"

"Very well, indeed," answered her trial fiance dryly. "I have always heard that when you were engaged to a girl she took the opportunity to torment you as thoroughly as possible. But I haven't any more personal experience of the holy bonds of affiancement than you have, my dear child."

Joy's heart suddenly reproached her for having teased such a kind person as this at all. She clutched his arm with such impulsive suddenness that the car almost left the road.

"John, I do want to be good to you! And I want to be as little trouble as possible! And I want to have you like me . . . and respect and admire me just the way that—"

"Just what way?" he inquired more gently.

"Never mind what way," Joy told him, coloring hotly. "Only if you'll please tell me what to do—it's hard to say, but I'll try to explain what I mean. Haven't you always thought, just a little, when you hadn't anything else to think of, that sometime there'd be—a girl?"

John Hewitt looked straight before him for a moment, as the car sped smoothly down a country lane. Then he nodded.

"Yes," he said, and no more. He was not given to talking about his feelings.

"And you planned her—a little—didn't you?" Joy persisted. "I know you did—people do. Well... John—couldn't you tell me a little bit about how She was going to act—so I could act that way? It would be more comfortable for you, I think. And I—I want to."

For a moment she thought he was not going to answer at all. He looked down at her silently. Then he spoke, a little abruptly.

"I never planned her in much detail," he said. "She always seemed to be dressed in blue, or in white, and her hair was parted. She seemed to be connected with a fireplace," he ended inconsequently, and laughed a little at himself. "You see, I'm not an imaginative person."

"I only wanted you to let me play I was that girl for this month," Joy answered desperately, with her eyes down, speaking very low.

John, who had been staring down at her in a half-puzzled way, looked as if he was suddenly reassured that she was only a little girl, after all—not a provoking firefly, but a wistful, unconscious child who only wanted to do her best to please.

"I want to be good," she said meekly.

"So you are," said John warmly.

"Am I?" she asked softly, looking up at him with wide blue eyes.

And—John was getting to do that sort of thing quite unnecessarily often—he laughed and bent toward her with every intention of kissing her again.

"Oh, that wasn't what I meant," she assured him. Then her mood suddenly changed. "John, you have what one of Grandfather's anarchist friends called a real from-gold heart. But you don't have to do that unless..."

"Unless what?" demanded John, quite coldly removing all of himself that he could from her half of the seat.

Joy's eyes fixed themselves on the distant scenery—excellent scenery, all autumn reds and yellows.

"I'll tell you the 'unless' tomorrow morning," she answered him sweetly, but none the less firmly.

"You are playing with me, Joy, I think," John answered in his most diagnostic tone—the exact tone in which he would have said, "You have smallpox, Joy, I think."

"Why, yes," she answered him demurely. "We were to, weren't we?"

"You'll have to wait out here a while; I have a case here," he told her in a voice which held a note of endurance.

She sat quite still, after suppressing a faint impulse to ask him if she should hold the motor. She leaned back and gave herself up to the country sights and sounds and scents, gently ecstatic.

"Oh, Aunt Lucilla!" she was saying inwardly. "You'd be proud of me!"

Joy was actually playing—he had said so—playing with a man!



CHAPTER SEVEN

A VERY CHARMING GENTLEMAN

"You look lovely," said Phyllis heartily. She herself was radiant in a rose satin that made her look, as her small son remarked ecstatically, like a valentine. "Mustn't it be horrid to be a man and always wear the same black clothes?"

"M'yes," answered Joy absent-mindedly. "If I look as nice as you do I don't have to worry. But—but will Gail Maddox be very much dressed?"

"She will," replied Phyllis decisively. "If I know Gail, she'll look like a Christmas tree. But don't let that weigh on your mind, dear child. Nobody could look better than you do, if Viola and I did combine two of your frocks into one. Could they, Viola?"

The colored girl, who had been doing the masses of Joy's bronze hair while her mistress, kneeling by the dressing-table, put the finishing touches to some frock-draperies, giggled.

"Well dressed? Why, Miss Joy looks like the vampire in the movie show!"

"Final praise!" sighed Phyllis. "You never told me I was as well dressed as a vampire, Viola."

"You couldn't live up to vampiring, nohow, Mrs. Harrington, nor you shouldn't want to, not with that goldy hair of yours," said Viola reprovingly.

"Virtue is thrust upon me, in other words," said Phyllis. "Evidently you have possibilities of crime, Joy!"

They went down, laughing, to where Allan and John were waiting for them, Allan walking the floor in his usual quick, boyish fashion, John sitting at a table reading, by way of economizing time. Being a doctor, he had a way of snapping up odds and ends of time and doing things with them.

He looked up from his paper as Joy's light footsteps pattered down the stairs, and continued to look at her. The green and silver of her gown glittered and flowed around her. Viola had done her hair high, and the wealth of it showed more, even, than when it was down in its accustomed braids. Her surprising black brows and lashes, with the innocence of her blue eyes, and the half-wistful, half-daring expression she had, made her seem a combination of sophistication and childishness such as John had never seen before.

"Shall I do you credit?" she asked him softly over her shoulder, as he held her wrap for her.

Her heart beat hard as she said it. She felt as if she was going into open battle, and she wanted all the heartening she could get.

"Tell me now that you like me better than you do Gail Maddox!" was what she wanted to say. But she knew she couldn't, not without being thought a cat. "I can't get over finding motors scattered all over everything!" was what she heard herself saying inconsequently instead as they went out. She did not dare give him time to answer her first impulsive question.

But he answered it just the same.

"You do me great credit, my dear. I never knew you were quite so beautiful." He said it gravely, but none the less sincerely. "It's very pleasant to remember that I have property rights to such a charming person."

Property rights! Joy's heart gave a little warm jump. If he could say that—if he could even seem to forget that she was only rented, so to speak...

Before she thought she had reached up and caught his hand in a warm, furtive grasp for a moment. She took it away again directly, but it had comforted her to touch him. He was so strong and so there.... Also, Viola's words comforted her; if she looked like a vampire, why, maybe, with the aid of the wishing ring and Aunt Lucilla's ghost, she could live up to it. Having her hair done as high and her dress cut as low as anybody's also gave her courage. Altogether it was, if not a perfectly self-assured, at least a very poised-looking little figure that came smiling into Mrs. Hewitt's embrace from the motor, with her lover close behind her, like a bodyguard.

"You little angel! You look perfect!" said her mother-in-law-elect rapturously. "And you match my lavender grandeur perfectly. That's a sweet frock, Phyllis. Hurry down, girls, you want to have a little time to rest before you have to stand up for years and receive."

It was early still when they came down from the dressing-rooms, and no guests had arrived yet. So they settled themselves in the dining-room, informally, to wait and visit a little.

"One has no chance for fun with an earnest-minded son," Mrs. Hewitt complained amiably. "This is the first doings of any sort I have ever had that John was even remotely connected with. A nice little daughter that would dance and flirt and turn the house upside down—that was what I was entitled to—and I got a brilliant young physician who specializes on the os innominata, or something equally thrilling! I sometimes wonder how he ever found time to annex you, Joy!"

Joy colored. It was a random shaft, but it caught her breath. Then—"He didn't," she said gallantly. "I simply rubbed my ring and wished for him, and he came."

"I'll be bound he didn't come hard," said her enfant terrible of a prospective mother-in-law placidly. "Johnny, keep away from those cakes! They're for much, much later, and for your guests, not the likes of you!"

"They are excellent. We need moral support in our ordeal," returned her son, sauntering up, with his usual dignity unimpaired by a plate of fancy cakes in each hand. "Never mind your cruel mother-in-law, Joy. Take a lot—take two!"

"I will, anyway," interposed Allan placidly, reaching a long, unexpected brown hand over his friend's shoulder and securing three. "Phyllis and I need as much moral support as anybody."

"Phyllis is the only one who is minding her manners," Mrs. Hewitt observed with a firmness that she patently didn't mean in the least. "Phyllis, my dear, go get some of the sandwiches. We may as well lunch thoroughly. We have heaps of time before the 'gesses' get here, anyway."

They were all playing like a lot of children. Phyllis, flushed and laughing, raided the kitchen with her husband and came back with more kinds of sandwiches than Joy had known existed. They sat about on cushions on the floor, because the chairs had been taken out for dancing later, and the floor waxed. Joy laughed with the rest, and lunched sumptuously on the cakes the guests ought to have had, and thought for the thousandth time what an ideal mother-in-law was hers at the moment, and how many of the people in the world were the realest of real folks, and how much like Christmas every-day life was getting to be...

"I see you are eating up everything before the really deserving poor arrive," said a slow, coolly amused voice behind Joy, who sat with her back to the entrance.

Joy did not need Mrs. Hewitt's equally calm "Good-evening, Gail. Since when have you been deserving?" to know who had entered.

"Came to help you receive," stated Gail further, still indolently, bringing herself further into the circle as she spoke, where Joy could see her. "I brought a stray cousin along—sex, male. I knew you wouldn't care—men are a godsend in New England towns. Here he is."

The cousin in question was evidently motioned to, for he appeared in the range of Joy's vision with a charming certainty of welcome, and the two merged themselves with the circle without more ceremony. They had evidently made their way to the dressing-rooms before coming to hunt for the family.

While Gail introduced her cousin a little more thoroughly, Joy gave her a furtive, but still more thorough, inspection. She seemed twenty-five or six. She was very slim, with lines like a boy more than a girl; sallow, with large, steady blue-gray eyes and heavy lashes, and lips that were so full that they were sullen-looking when her face was still. She was not unusually pretty—indeed, by Phyllis' rose-and-golden beauty she looked dingy—but she had something arresting about her, and the carriage and manner of a girl who is insolently certain that whatever she says or does is perfect because she does it. She had on a straight blue chiffon frock, cut unusually low: so low that it was continually slipping off one thin shoulder. Allan confided to Joy afterward that Gail's shoulder-straps worried him to madness.

Joy watched Miss Maddox with fascinated eyes. "I'm so young!" she thought forlornly, "and all the rest of them are so dreadfully grown-up!"

She felt as if Gail Maddox, with her brilliant, careless sentences, and her half-insolent confidence, owned everybody there much more than she did: and she felt little and underdressed and outclassed to a point where even Gail might pity her, and probably did.... And if there is a more abjectly awful feeling than that the Other Girl pities you, nobody has discovered it yet.... Gail might even know how much of a pretender she was. If John—but no. John wasn't like that. He was—"fantastically honorable," she had heard Phyllis call it. John hadn't told—he wouldn't tell if his own happiness depended on it.... And Joy let her thoughts stray off into a maze of wondering as to whether she would rather have her self-respect saved by not having Gail know, or whether, if it would break John's heart to be separated forever from Gail, she oughtn't to tell him to tell.

Gail, lounging in a low chair she had dragged across the waxed floor in the face of all outcries, with one electric-blue-shod foot stretched out before her, looked exactly the person you'd care least to have know anything they could scorn you about. She could scorn so well and so convincingly, Joy felt, listening to her. There wouldn't be a thing left of you when she got through.

"I feel as alone as Robinson Crusoe," thought Joy forlornly.

She rose restlessly and picked up the tray which had borne their illegal sandwiches, with the idea of carrying it and herself out of sight. She wanted a minute to brace herself in.

As she did it, Allan rose, too, unexpectedly, as he did most things. "Here, I'll take some of those," he offered, and helped her carry the debris out.

They set down their burdens on a pantry table, whence three scandalized maids whisked them somewhere else again, gazing the while reproachfully at the invaders.

"I haven't any use for that girl," stated Allan plainly, as they went back. "Don't let her fuss you, Joy."

Joy looked gratefully up at him. The whole world, then, didn't prefer Gail Maddox to her!

"She makes me feel exactly like a small dog that has stolen a bone and got caught," Joy acknowledged directly, with a little shamefaced laugh.

"She'll do her best in that line," responded Allan, who seemed to have no great affection for the lady. "Don't let her bother you. He's your bone—hang on to him. In short, sic 'em!"

They both laughed, and Joy came back with her bronze head high and an access of fresh courage. She sat down this time between John and the cousin, whose name she had not heard. But she began talking hard to him. Occasionally she tossed John, fenced in beside her, a cheerful word. He seemed perfectly satisfied at first, but the cousin did not. He wanted Joy all to himself, it appeared, and a fiance more or less seemed to have no bearing on the case, as far as he was concerned.

Presently John woke up to this fact and began the effort to repossess himself of his lawful property. Joy cast a mischievous glance at Allan, sitting on the arm of his wife's chair (chairs had become the order of the day), and Allan grinned happily, by some means telegraphing the situation to Phyllis. Every one was happy except John, and perhaps Gail, who presently eyed the three and used her usual weapon of lazy frankness.

"It makes me furious to see both of you making violent love to Joy Havenith," she said indolently. "Clarence, go start the victrola, my good man. This must be put a stop to."

Clarence lifted himself from the floor by Joy, but he calmly took her hand along with him, and raised her, too.

"She's going to christen the floor with me," he informed his cousin. "Come on, Miss Joy!"

The isolation that ordinarily doth hedge an engaged girl, where men are concerned, seemed to trouble Clarence not at all. He was, by the way, in spite of the fact that he would some day be too stout, one of the best-looking men who ever lived. He had a good deal of his cousin's lazy assurance—in him it sometimes verged on impudence, but never beyond the getting-away-with point—and a heavenly smile. His other name was, unbelievably, Rutherford, which almost took the curse off the Clarence, as he said, but not quite. And if he had gone into the movies he would have made millions, beyond a doubt.

He drew Joy across the floor with him, in her green-and-silver draperies, and began to wind the victrola, which had been tucked into a nook where Mrs. Hewitt had vainly hoped it would be quite hidden. There was to be an orchestra afterwards for the authorized dancing.

Clarence put on "Poor Butterfly," and encircling Joy proceeded to dance away with her.

"But I don't know how to dance," she gasped as she felt herself being drawn smoothly across the floor.

"That doesn't matter, Sorcerette, dear," said Clarence blandly. "Just let go—be clay in the hands of the potter. I'll do the dancing for two. Hear me?"

Joy did as she was told, and—marvel of marvels!—found herself following him easily. She was really dancing!

"But why did you call me that?" she demanded, like a child, as she got her breath. To her apprehensive mind the name sounded as if Gail had not only learned her dark secret but had passed it on to her dear Cousin Clarence.

"Because you look it," said he promptly, in a voice that softened from word to word. "...Harrington is a good dancer, isn't he? Phyllis looks all right, but I fancy she guides hard. Those tall women often do.... Why, anybody with brows and lashes like yours, and hair that color, combined with that angelic please-guide-me-through-a-hard-world expression simply shrieks aloud for a name like that. A sorcerette is a cross between a seraph and a little witch. There's no telling what she might do to you!"

"Oh!" cooed Joy.

It sounded like a very happy "Oh," and Clarence, experienced love-pirate though he was, hadn't a way in the world of knowing that Joy's pleasure came of being still undiscovered, not of his winning ways.

She danced on with him to the very last note of the record, enraptured to find that she really could dance, and came back to the end of the room where Mrs. Hewitt still sat; her eyes starry with delight.

"Oh, I can dance when I just go where the man takes me!" she cried. "I never knew I could!"

"You dance very well," said John's quiet voice from behind his mother's chair. "Will you dance with me now?"

Joy, regarding him, saw that he was vexed. Most people would not have noticed it, but very few of his moods escaped Joy. He was a little graver than usual, and his voice was quieter.

"If I can," she answered. "I thought you were dancing this with Miss Maddox."

"I didn't think it would show proper courtesy to my fiancee to dance first with some one else," John answered.

Clarence had set the music going again, and was swinging round the room with Gail. As it began, John, with no more words, drew Joy out on the floor with him.

She looked up in surprise at his words.

"Why—why, I didn't know I was that much of a fiancee to you. I thought probably you'd rather be with Gail. And—and I didn't know I was going to dance anyway. I didn't know I could!"

He looked down at her again, apparently to see whether she was in earnest, holding her off for a moment as they danced.

She hoped he would deny that he preferred being with Gail, but he did not.

"We are going through our month of relationship right," he told her definitely, smiling, but looking down at her with the steady, steel-colored light in his gray eyes that she knew meant "no appeal." "Gail does not enter into it at all. But I admit that Rutherford's quickness put me in the wrong."

"If only," thought Joy, acutely conscious of his firm hold, "instead of laying down the law that way, he would let go and admit that he was angry!" For he certainly was, and it wasn't at all her fault, unless going where Clarence took her was a crime. John hadn't thought of dancing first. Was he the kind of person who always thought he was right even when he knew he wasn't? If so, maybe a month was long enough.... But the thought of the end of the month hurt, no matter how unreasonable she tried to think John, and she threw down her arms—the only way, if she had known, to make John throw down his.

"Are you angry at me?" she half whispered. "I—please don't be angry. Nobody ever was, and I don't want to be silly, but I don't believe I could stand it."

He swept her rhythmically on, but she could feel his arm relax and hold her more warmly, and his wonderful gray eyes softened again as they looked into hers.

"Poor little thing! I keep forgetting that you're just a child. Sometimes you aren't, you know."

"No, sometimes I'm not," Joy echoed. Then she laughed up at him impishly. "You say this thing is going to be done right?" she mocked. "Very well, then, when Mr. Rutherford is nice to me you ought to be nicer. When he sits down close to me and tells me I'm a sorcerette—"

"A what?" demanded John swiftly. "See here, Joy, I'm practically in charge of you, and you're very young, you know, and can't be expected to know much about men. Rutherford is attractive and all that, but he's a man I wouldn't trust the other side of a biscuit. Any man can tell you that. Allan—"

"He talks just like a poet," said Joy innocently. How could John know that this was an insult, not a compliment, in Joy's mind? She had seen any amount of Clarences—ignoring her, to be sure, but still saying Clarence things to others in her hearing—all her days.

"That may be," said John. "I'm no judge of poets, and I suppose you are.... See here, Joy, there's an inhabitant—two of 'em—coming in the doorway. Mother'll be wanting you to stand in a silly line and pass people along to her, or away from her, or something. Come here with me and we'll finish this. You're getting a wrong impression of what I mean."

Joy found herself being steered masterfully into a little semi-dark room that opened off the long parlor. John planted her in a low chair in a corner and pulled up a stool for himself just opposite.

"They won't find us for at least ten minutes, unless we wigwag. Now—what's a sorcerette?"

His tone, in spite of his carelessness, betrayed a certain anxiety to learn. Joy answered him with fullness and simplicity.

"A sorcerette is somebody with coloring like mine, and a cross between a seraph and a little witch," she replied innocently. "That's what Clarence said. But I think he made up the name himself," she added conscientiously, as if that would be some help.

John grinned a little in spite of himself.

"I don't like the idea particularly of his making the name up himself," he remarked; "but there is something in what Rutherford said!"

"I'm very glad you think so," said Joy with a transparent meekness. "And now that you've found out, isn't it time you went back to your duties?"

He looked at her doubtfully, where she sat in the half-light with her head held high and her hands crossed on her green-and-silver lap. He could not quite make out her expression.

But he had not much more chance for cross-questioning, because guests were beginning to come thickly, and his mother was sending out agonized scouting parties for the feature of the evening.

Phyllis, knowing the rooms of old, discovered her. She swooped down on the pair, where they were sitting in the little dim room.

"You wretched people, this is no time for that sort of thing!" she exclaimed, shoving them before her. "Please try to remember that you will, in all likelihood, spend a lifetime together. Joy, three severe New England spinsters have already taken Gail Maddox for you. Hurry!"

The suggestion was quite enough, as Phyllis may have known it would be. Joy whisked into her place, which was opposite the double doors, between Mrs. Hewitt and Phyllis, and taking her burden of white chrysanthemums on one arm, proceeded to be as charming to her future patients-in-law as she knew how.

Mrs. Hewitt and Phyllis cast glances of astonished admiration at each other over her head. They neither of them had thought of Joy as anything but a sweet child, or an affectionate child—a darling, but shy and unused to the world. But she was managing her share of the evening's pageant as if she had run a salon for twenty years. It did not occur to them that the explanation was that she practically had been brought up in one. She had been a part of the bi-weekly receptions given to the small and great of the earth by Havenith the poet ever since she was old enough to come into the parlors and could be trusted not to cry or snatch cake.

"Good gracious, Joy, where did you learn to drive people four-in-hand this way?" breathed Phyllis admiringly, in a lull. "I know, if I'd had to talk to two Miss Peabodys and three Miss Brearleys and a stray Jones all at once, at least five of them would have hated me forever after. And you kept them going like a juggler's balls!"

"They're not half as hard as the people at Grandfather's afternoons," answered Joy. "He had almost every kind of person—everybody wanted to see him, you know, and he felt it his duty to gratify as many as he could, he said. Oh, Phyllis, ten Brearleys and Peabodys are nothing to trying to make three Celtic poets and a vers-librist talk pleasantly to each other!"

"You're a darling," said Phyllis irrelevantly.

"I see you've been working virtuously hard," put in Gail pleasantly, sauntering up. "Now, I gave up being noble-hearted to the uninteresting some time ago. There's very little in it. I collected a suitor or so early in the evening, and we've been telling each other what we really thought of all the worst guests, in the little room off. You ought to hear John's description of—"

"She shan't—it's not for your young ears," said Clarence possessively from where he stood, a little behind Gail. Gail had three men with her—Clarence, John, and a slim youth who looked younger than he proved to be, and who answered to the name of Tiddy.

All Joy's feelings of triumph and innocent satisfaction in having won the liking of Mrs. Hewitt's guests faded. She felt as Gail had made her feel before—foolishly good and ridiculously young and altogether unsuccessful in life. For a moment the mood held her in a very crushed state of mind: then she caught Clarence's eyes fixed upon her with a look of amused admiration. It spurred her.

"I've been doing my duty by my future lord and master," she said lightly. "But now you put it that way, he doesn't sound like a worthy cause a bit."

The men laughed, though Joy's words hadn't sounded particularly witty to herself. "I'm going to abjure duty now," she went on hurriedly. "The orchestra's playing that thing people can dance me to——"

She held her hand and arm gracefully high, in the old minuet pose, and laughed up at Clarence. He wasn't supposed to be her lover, and yet he saw through Gail when John didn't——

"By Jove, I can do the minuet!" he said eagerly. "Can you, Miss Joy?"

She smiled and nodded.

"Grandma told me all about it, Taught me so I could not doubt it,"

she sang softly.

"We'll do it—we'll do it for the happy villagers!" proclaimed Clarence.

"Here, Tiddy, go cut a girl out of the herd, and find Harrington, too. We're the bell-cows. All you others have to do is to obediently follow us—the men follow me and the women tag around after Miss Joy—which last seems wrong, but can't be helped."

"Not at all," said John amiably. "Far be it from me to seem to steal your thunder, Rutherford, but I, too, was in the village pageant last year, and I minuet excellently. All my grateful patients said so. You know, if you led off, they might take you for the man who's going to marry Miss Havenith."

Clarence couldn't very well do or say anything to his host, but he looked far from pleased as John took Joy's hand and quietly led her into line. Tiddy came up just then with a pretty, dark little girl whom he had selected with great judgment from the guests as being just of a height between Joy and Gail. He had also enlisted the orchestra, for it began to play "La Cinquantaine" as they all took their places facing each other. They were all laughing, even Clarence. The guests, catching the spirit of the thing, began to laugh and applaud, and—it seemed like magic that it could be done so swiftly—formed two more sets in the rest of the room, while the elders, against the wall, watched approvingly.

"I thought nobody but me danced minuets any more," Joy whispered to John as, her eyes alight with happiness, she crossed him in the changes of the lovely old dance.

"There happened to be a historical pageant here last summer," he explained to her, "and there were eight minuet sets in the Revolutionary episode, so we had to learn. Mother hounded me into it. I'm glad now she did."

"Why?" inquired Joy innocently the next time she met him.

"I like to maintain my rights," he answered with a little gleam of fun in his eyes.

But Joy felt fairly certain that the gleam of fun had behind it a gleam of decision. Certainly John's motto was, "What's mine's mine!"—even when it was rented.

They finished to applause, and as the orchestra ended its minuet it slid on into a modern dance, and so did each of the couples, dancing on out on the floor.

Joy sank down at the end of the waltz on a seat by the wall, with John beside her.

He bent over her.

"Having a good time, kiddie?" he asked her gently. She nodded, her eyes like stars.

"Oh, I'm people, at last!" she said with a soft exultance. "I've always looked on and looked on, like a doll or a mechanical figure—and I'm real—I'm in the midst of things! And it's all you and the wishing ring! ... John, did you see? Your people—they really liked me!"

"Of course they did, you little goosie," he told her, smiling down at her. "You have more personal charm than almost any girl I ever knew. I don't know any one who doesn't like you."

"Gail doesn't," Joy ventured.

John shook his head.

"You don't understand Gail," he said. "She's a mighty brilliant girl. She doesn't often like other girls, I admit that—but she took to you. I could see it."

"Could you?" flashed Joy. "Men see so much! ... She's beckoning to you."

She flung her head back angrily. Nobody likes to be told she doesn't understand another girl—and the fact that the girl is mighty brilliant doesn't make you feel better about it.

"I'll be back in just a moment," said John obliviously, and went with what seemed to Joy unnecessary docility.

She stood there alone, her hands clasped hard, her head up—to all appearance a vivid, triumphant little figure. Her heart was beating like mad and her cheeks burnt. She had just found out something about herself, something that a wiser, older woman would have known a long time ago: as long ago as when the Wishing Ring Man stood, the light glinting on his fair hair and sturdy shoulders, in the opening of Grandfather's hall door.

She was in love with John—furiously, wildly, heart-breakingly in love with him. And she was going to have to live close by him for a month, knowing that, and keeping him from knowing it—and then go away from him and never see him any more.

"This is our dance, Sorcerette," said Clarence's voice in her ear.



CHAPTER EIGHT

A FOUNTAIN IN FAIRYLAND

Joy had supposed, when she finally went to sleep at three in the morning, that she would waken with all the excitement gone and feeling very unhappy. She had always heard that it made you unhappy to be in love.

Instead, she opened her eyes with the excitement of it all still pulsing through her. The fact that John was in the world and she could care for him seemed almost enough to account for the sense of happiness that possessed her as she pattered over to the window and looked out. And what little more was needed to account for her exhilaration could be found in the wonderful September morning outside. There probably were troubles somewhere or other, such as darkened city parlors, minor poets, and sophisticated seekers after John, but somehow she and they didn't connect. The air was so tingling and sunny, and the garden was so beautiful, and being young and free and in the country was so heavenly that she dressed and ran down, and sang along the garden paths as she picked herself a big bunch of golden chrysanthemums and purple and pink asters.