Clarence had a habit of talking that way, and Joy didn't pay much attention to it. In a phrase of his own, it was like kissing over the telephone—it didn't get you anywhere, but it had a cunning sound. It has a warming feeling to think that any one is in love with you, even if you know they aren't. She said as much.

But Clarence became what was, for him, sulky. Clarence had one curious thing about him: he never showed his temper at all, but you couldn't be with him ten minutes without being morally certain that he had a very bad and sullen one, which he merely kept concealed for reasons of his own. Whereas John Hewitt's temper, which undisguisedly was in existence, wasn't a thing you ever thought of excepting rather amusedly and affectionately. It was such a little-boy thing in comparison with the grown-up, responsible rest of him! It would undoubtedly appear some time this afternoon or evening. At the thought of it Joy felt her usual affectionate amusement. When it was over he would be very sorry.

"You haven't told me anything about the comic opera yet," she hinted to Clarence, who had been quite silent for the last while. "Don't you want to?"

"I do!" said Clarence, coming out of his muse and turning into his ordinary self. "We will sit down on the next stump or stone we see, and go into the matter thoroughly."

It was a large flat stone, with a tree for Joy to lean against. They sat down on it, and Clarence pulled the libretto book out of his pocket, and they went to work.

Joy knew the Gilbert and Sullivan operas from a copy of the words that had always been around the house. So there was no delay while she read the book through, as Clarence seemed to have expected.

"To my mind it lies between 'Patience' and 'Iolanthe,'" said Clarence. "The 'Mikado' has been done to death, and so has 'Trial by Jury.' And 'Princess Ida' is too full of blank verse, and the men's solos are too hard."

So far as Joy was concerned nothing had been done to death. She would quite willingly have been the humblest chorus-girl in "Pinafore," if Clarence had willed to have that much-done classic. But he seemed determined to have her play a large part in whatever it was, and to have whatever it was Iolanthe. He wanted to be Strephon, it seemed; in fact, he had been. And he wanted Joy for the Phyllis or Iolanthe.

Joy had a faint feeling that Phyllis Harrington ought to have the part with her own name, but Clarence explained that names had nothing whatever to do with it unless you were a movie star, when you used your first name in order to make the public more interested in your personality.

"We will give Gail the part you don't want," he told her, "as a punishment for not letting you cook your eight-course dinner tonight. By the way, we must time ourselves to get back and eat it. I wonder whether Gail can cook. On second thoughts, why not stay out till it's over?"

"The play!" said Joy imperatively.

"Well," he said, yielding, "would you rather be a fairy princess or a shepherdess from Arcady? I'd prefer to have you the shepherdess, for personal reasons. I wish to be the shepherd."

"Whatever you say," said Joy absently. "It's getting colder. Hadn't we better walk a little?"

"Very well," said Clarence. "We can argue as we walk."

The problem of making sixteen young women willing to be a chorus and of finding sixteen or twenty young men to be anything, took them quite a while to discuss. They walked on as they talked, until it began to get darker.

"By the way, have you any idea where we are?" inquired Clarence, stopping short to look about him. "New England woods are not my native habitat."

"Nor mine," said Joy, startled. "I think we ought to go back to the high road."

"If there's any left to go back to," suggested Clarence. "We've been on one way-path after another so long that I don't think I could find it again."

They turned around, and continued to follow way-paths back. Clarence had no pocket compass, such as people who get lost ought to possess. And it was getting relentlessly darker and darker. Joy had never been lost before, and she was surprised to find the feeling of panic that possessed her when she grasped the fact that neither of them knew where they were. Finally they gained a clear space where there was a tolerably traveled-looking road.

"If we wait here somebody may come along," said Clarence. "Jove, I'm hungry!"

"So am I," said Joy.

But there wasn't anything to do about that. Finally Joy remembered that she had some chocolate in her little handbag, and they divided it and ate it. After that life was a little brighter.

"Do you suppose we'll have to stay here all night?" demanded Joy. "We'll freeze to death if we do."

"No, I don't," said Clarence. "But, Joy dear, if we do——"

The mockery was all out of his voice.

"Oh, don't talk about it!" she exclaimed. "Surely somebody will come get us—or couldn't we go up this road till we find a farmhouse?"

"If you like," said Clarence.

They rose and walked on for a while.

"Oh, listen!" Joy whispered. "I hear something!"

"It's a car," said Clarence hopefully.

And it was. It was John's car, with John in it, and the temper Joy had been thinking of tenderly was with him. He was evidently thoroughly angry, for he scarcely spoke, even when he found them.

"See here, Hewitt," Clarence protested. "You aren't doing the thing at all properly. You should say, 'My own! At last I have found you!' instead of backing up the car with a short sentence like that."

What John had said, as a matter of fact, was, "Get in the car. It's late."

He did come to a little at Clarence's flippant reminder, and smiled reluctantly.

"Well, you see, it was self-evident. I had found you both. You oughtn't to have walked so far if you didn't know where you were going."

"It is also self-evident that it is late," said Clarence stiffly, and, it must be confessed, a little sulkily. "Nevertheless, we're having a very pleasant time.... Is dinner over?"

John, for no apparent reason, smiled frankly at this. "Not in the least," he said. "They are waiting dinner till the prodigals' return. My mother has had hers sent up to her, but Gail and your friend Tiddy are kindly keeping the rest of it hot."

It is a quicker journey in a car than when you stroll leisurely along, discussing light opera and your disposition. They were surprised to find how near, comparatively, they were, to the village.

"Joy, do you suppose I am invited to dinner?" asked Clarence in a stage whisper. "If it is not thus I shall probably starve by the roadside, because Gail sent her mother to a bridge-and-high-tea before she went, and the maids there had no orders about food. That's why I was prowling about the hospitable Hewitt mansion."

Joy couldn't help smiling. "I think you must be," she said.

But she didn't understand John's allusion to Tiddy. He was abjectly devoted to Gail, but it did seem that devotion had its limits, when it came to following her to somebody else's house.

"What is Tiddy doing in these parts?" Clarence asked for her, as people so often do ask your questions for you if you only give them time. "Dinner-party, is it?"

"Tiddy," said John dryly, "is making himself useful."

"That is nothing at all new in Tiddy's life," said Gail's cousin. "People who dwell about Gail do. Am I to understand that he is chief cook and bottle-washer?"

"You are," said John.

They got out and went into the house, Joy feeling as mussy as only a girl can who has been away from home all day. She followed the curious-minded Clarence into the kitchen.

The sight that met their eyes was an interesting one. The kitchen was a pleasant sight to any one from outside, being warmed and lighted. It was further decorated by Gail, in a very low and clinging black frock trimmed with poppies, which it occurred to Joy must have been in the grip. She was sitting in absolute idleness in a kitchen chair, with her feet on a footstool, and Tiddy, swathed in an apron with pink checks, was engaged at the kitchen range.

"Good work, old boy!" Clarence called out to him. "What have you got?"

Tiddy turned a scarlet face toward him, and waved one hand, with a spoon in it.

"Gail said there had to be a good dinner," he said worriedly, "but I don't know how to make many things. This is soup.... It doesn't look right to me, somehow. Come here, Clarence, and give it a once over."

Joy, leaning against the lintel with John a little behind her as usual, couldn't help but admire Gail. She knew perfectly well that it would never have occurred to her in Gail's place to sit placidly in a chair while a lad who ought to have been at home studying-Tiddy was cramming to catch up with his class at college—wrestled with the stove. But, after all, that was the sort of thing she had always read of sirens doing. And even if the victim was only a little college boy, of what Clarence called frying size, it was a sight to make one wishful. Also apprehensive—mightn't Gail set John peeling potatoes next? That sight would be an annoying one from various angles.

John showed no signs of being about to yield, at least at the moment. He joined Clarence in teasing Tiddy, who took it very sweetly, but he finally came forward and showed the lad how to manage the drafts.

"Call us when you're ready, Cookie," said Clarence amiably, and sauntered out. John followed him.

"Can't I help?" asked Joy, staying conscientiously behind. She still felt that it was her responsibility.

"Not a bit," said Gail. "We're getting along wonderfully. You'd better go up and get straightened out, though—you look blown to bits. Oh, and send John back as you go through, Tiddy can't do the drafts right."

Joy went out obediently.

"John, I am to send you back as I go through. Tiddy can't do the drafts right," she repeated in a colorless voice that had anger underneath it, and walking on as she spoke.

"Drafts—nonsense—Gail's lonesome," Clarence answered cheerfully, from the couch where he had thrown himself.

"All right," said John, who was the soul of politeness, but an annoyingly dense person compared to Clarence, it seemed to Joy. He went out. Joy ran upstairs as fast as she could go. She arrived at the top, breathless and still angry, and remembered that she ought to go in and see Mrs. Hewitt. But the lights were low, generally a sign that the lady was asleep, so she went on to her own room.

"Blown to bits!" she said to herself bitterly, stopping opposite her confidant, the mirror. "And she sitting on a chair looking like Marie Antoinette being taken to execution in a kitchen chair!"

It was a breathless and tautological remark, but it relieved her feelings. "I oughtn't to feel that way," she reminded herself. "Because after all, Gail was here first!"

This didn't seem to make much difference in the feelings. And it was unquestionable that she was blown about, and very young and owned no black dress with poppies, nor yet any college boy who would cook for her at a wave of the hand.

She pawed her wardrobe through furiously. Joy was always very dependent for encouragement on the clothes she wore. The proper gown could make her feel the way it looked, always. They almost had moods sewed into them around the bottom, she thought sometimes.

The way she had felt last time she wore the amber satin with the poem to it, that one she had hated so furiously—could she feel that way again if she put on the dress? She'd felt young—oh, yes, but as if youth were a perfectly splendid thing to have. And very alive, and superior, and rebellious. And ready to have a lover, and to treat him, if necessary, like a dog—like a whole kennel of dogs!

So she put it on. She made herself exactly the little princess of Grandfather's reception days, trailing chiffon panels, swinging jewel-filleted braids and all, and swept downstairs with her head high.

Tiddy had by this time managed to get the dinner on the table, and the other two men, out of sheer pity, were helping him. In fact, having enthroned Gail at the table, they were making a frolic of the whole thing.

"Here, catch the steak, Rutherford," John was saying cheerfully. And Clarence, with carving-knife and fork outheld, was making as neat a catch as possible.

"Here, Tiddy, don't try to stagger in along under those biscuits. You made 'em. That kind takes two strong men—I know, I've eaten your biscuits before."

"I made these the regular way, with yeast," said Tiddy in an injured voice. "I couldn't help it if they didn't rise in the oven. Go rag the cookbook."

Joy could stand it no longer. Forgetting her real state, she rushed out on them, where they wrestled with the dinner and Tiddy. They were playing handball with the biscuits by this time.

"Oh, Tiddy! You didn't put yeast in those biscuits!" she reproached him. "Why, you poor unfortunate boy, yeast has to rise over night, or an afternoon anyhow! They're no use!"

They all three stopped simultaneously at the vision which she had quite honestly forgotten she presented. Tiddy listened humbly, and Clarence made a low bow.

"The Queen came in the kitchen, speaking bread and honey," he quoted appositely, while John looked both pleased and proud.

"There, I told you so," he said with triumph. "I said you were in wrong with those biscuits. Joy always knows."

"'It was the very best butter,'" quoted Tiddy (who was not without a sense of humor), from "Alice."

"But what can we do?" asked John, who was concentrated on the situation. "The steak's all right—any idiot can broil steak, as Tiddy has proved—" he had to stop short to dodge a biscuit—"and the soup came out of a can, so maybe that'll do. But there isn't a bit of bread, and we simply have to have it. At least I suppose so."

"Get me an apron, please," Joy asked of the surroundings, and two aprons were offered her excitedly by three willing hands. She pinned both on, as a precaution against ruining the amber satin, though she didn't much mind if it had been ruined, and began by investigating the soup. It was the best canned tomato bisque, but its cook had not known or read that it should be watered, or milked, and it was so thick it was almost stiff. She sent Clarence for milk out of the refrigerator, and treated it properly. Then she looked at the biscuits, such as had escaped destruction. They were indeed hopeless.

"I can make biscuits in a minute, but it will take a half-hour to bake them in this range," she told them, where they stood, anxiously awaiting her verdict. "If you didn't mind having them baked on a griddle——"

"Like the ones the fellow does in the window at Childs'! Fine!" responded Tiddy enthusiastically. "I'll get the griddle. I've learned where everything grows."

He produced it accordingly, and watched Joy, as did the others, entranced, while she mixed and cut out biscuits, and baked them in the griddle scone-fashion.

They made it a triumphal procession after that, with the biscuits borne high by Tiddy before Joy, who came in carrying the steak, followed by Clarence and John with a dish of canned vegetables apiece. It was far from being the dinner Joy had planned, but the biscuits were greatly admired, and every one was happy. That is, Joy was, and apparently the men were. Joy was so pleased to think that she had been able to straighten out things, and get them a good dinner, that she forgot to think about Gail at all. She sat in the tall armchair at the head of the table where John had placed her, and poured coffee in big cups, to be taken with the dinner, with flushed cheeks and a gay heart.

"But what I want to know is," demanded Clarence, "why nobody's ever seen that frock before."

"I have," John answered from the foot. "Joy had that on the very first time I saw her, amber beads and crown and all. I never thought then I'd see her making my biscuits in it."

"It's an allegory," said Clarence. "Man captures the beautiful princess of his dream, and sets her to drudging in his kitchen. I think there is something sad but sweet, as Shaw would say, about it."

"But I wanted to make the biscuits!" cried Joy before she thought. "If I hadn't there wouldn't have been any for dinner—and you had to have dinner."

"They didn't at all," said Gail. "You spoil men. If you always say, 'But he has to have it!' and then go tearing around getting it for him, why——"

She shrugged her shoulders.

"There are excellent biscuits a half-mile away, at the baker's in the village, and a motor-car outside."

Joy laughed blithely.

"But you see, I'm not used to a motor-car. I'm not motor-people at all.... Well, I suppose when you live with a poet you get in the habit of feeling you must do what people want of you. Grandfather was so great, you see, we felt it was—well, only polite. At least Grandmother brought me up that way."

"I—I say! Was your grandfather the Alton Havenith!" exclaimed Tiddy, opening his eyes widely. "The one in all the readers and cram-books and anthologies?"

"Is." corrected Joy. "He's quite alive. Yes, that's Grandfather—and this is one of my dresses for his receptions," she added as an afterthought.

"Good gracious!" breathed Tiddy reverently. They were at the canned peaches and pound-cake by this time. "I—I suppose you couldn't say any of his things?" he ended diffidently. He was evidently a worshiper.

Joy felt quite herself by now, the old self-possessed Joy of the salon and recitations.

"Well, not over the dessert," she said, laughing. "But as soon as dinner is over, if you want me to. There's one I say to a harp. There's a harp here."

"Can you play a harp, too?" demanded Clarence, "as well as make biscuits? See here, Tiddy, you forget your position in life. You're a cook. Get thee to the kitchen, while Joy entertains us, who are the real quality folks."

"Nonsense," smiled John. "We'll leave things as they are—can't we, Joy?"

He led the way into the parlor and uncovered the harp for her. No one would have guessed by his demeanor that this was the first sign he had had of Joy's accomplishment—he was as matter-of-fact as possible about it. Only once he smiled across at her secretly, as if they had something private between them, as she asked him which thing he thought she had better say to begin with, and named one immediately.

She flung back the chiffon that trailed down one slim, round arm, and, after a little preliminary tuning, began to play. It was "To Myrtilla at Seventeen" that John had suggested, and harp-music went well with it. Then she went on to more. She had never thought that Grandfather would help her this way!

They kept her at the harp most of the evening. From Grandfather's poems she slid to some of Grandmother's old songs, plaintive old things of Civil War days. She was earnestly trying to make her guests and John's have as good a time as lay in her power, and she never thought about Gail, quiet and quite out of the center of the stage, at all.

Tiddy, rapt and worshipful, clung close to her till the evening was over.

"I say," he told her when the others were going, "you—do you know, you're wonderful! I—do you mind if I come over tomorrow? There's a lot of things I'd like to ask you about Alton Havenith. I—could I?"

"Why, of course," said Joy, with her usual eager desire to do anything nice she could for people.

He thanked her fervently, and went with obvious reluctance. Gail was a little silent, even for her, who only talked when she chose. And at last Joy and John were alone. She felt a little shy of him.

"I must go clear up," she said presently, as he did not speak, moving toward the dining-room.

"You must not," he told her, with the affectionate note in his voice she loved to hear. "I want to stay here and appreciate my princess a little, and I can't do it well when she's away—or I don't want to. Sit down, Joy. I scarcely ever see anything of you any more.... Dear child, why on earth did you let Gail rampage all over the house this way? You could have had a maid in from the village."

"But she said she was going to—and I thought you knew!" cried Joy, her heart leaping up.

"Oh, you mean she took possession?" he said. "I see. That is like Gail. Well—don't let her, next time, my dear."

"I'd much, much rather not!" said Joy enthusiastically, "but she said she'd made it all right with your mother, and——"

"Oh, in that case," said John, "all right." Then he dismissed the subject, looking into the fire. "I find out some new thing about you every day, kiddie," he said. "I'm afraid I must seem like a rather quiet and unaccomplished person to you,—compared to other men."

"You mean because I ran off with Clarence," said Joy with remorseful directness, and her usual child-likeness. "I was cross because you liked Gail."

He laughed. "And I was cross because you liked Clarence. Shall we both reform a bit, little girl?"

"Oh, yes!" replied Joy radiantly. "Only I haven't much to reform about," she added thoughtfully. "Except he's kind to me, and he understands things sometimes you don't...."

John sighed a little. "I see. Yes, he's that sort. Well, try to make me understand, dear, won't you? ... I want to."

She slipped her hand impulsively in his as she did sometimes.

"Then that's all right," he said contentedly.

But the most all right thing, to Joy's unregenerate heart, was next morning, when she went up to pay her usual morning visit to Mrs. Hewitt.

"Joy, will you tell me," demanded the lady, "what you meant by telling Gail you wanted her to do the housekeeping?"



CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE SERIOUS BUSINESS OF "IOLANTHE"

There was no use having it out with Gail. Joy was not one of those nerve-shaking people who insist on having things out, anyhow. She was perfectly content with things as they were.

The weather settled down to be legitimate October weather, a little early: crisply lovely outdoors, and of the temperature to be an excuse for fires indoors at night. Tiddy transferred his allegiance, still a little shyly, to Joy. The change was good for him, because they were, after all, very much of an age. They got to be excellent friends. Also Joy kept him at his studies in a fashion that was, for her, quite severe: he had asked her if she wouldn't, and she did. She went off for tramps with him when John was otherwise employed, which seemed to please John, and prevented her from having Clarence too much underfoot.

Gail referred to Tiddy's desertion with her usual note of indolent amusement—it did not occur to Joy till years later that Gail might occasionally pretend a superiority to such things as annoy other girls—and summoned another man from the city for week-ends. Tiddy was indigenous to the soil. This, as Clarence, with his amiable superiority, said, was so much to the good, for when you come to amateur theatricals every man is a man. Clarence was working with an industry nobody would ever have suspected in him, over "Iolanthe."

It was easy enough to collect the principals. With a certain amount of nobility of character, Clarence assigned himself the part of Lord Chancellor, remarking that he could make a fool of himself rather better than most men he knew. Incidentally he played opposite to Joy, who refused flatly to take the leading part of Phyllis, and was therefore cast for Iolanthe. They found a suitable and sufficiently stalwart Fairy Queen in the neighborhood, and made Gail's weekend man Private Willis, because two rehearsals a week were enough for that part, and he was the tallest man, nearly, that any one had ever seen. He was six feet three and a half, which is about two and a half inches more than is necessary for beauty and suitability, to quote Clarence again; but quite what they wanted just here.

"But where on earth to get a chorus!" wailed Clarence, after a rehearsal in the big Hewitt parlor. They were keeping it more or less a family affair. The Harringtons had returned, bringing the De Guenthers with them in triumph. Mrs. De Guenther was a dear little old lady who took a deep interest in the whole scheme, and was of great use in the costuming. Mr. De Guenther, scholarly, soft-voiced, and courteously precise, was also allowed to be present at rehearsals; not because of the costuming, but because he remembered performances at the Savoy when he was a young man in London, and could coach them in the business.

"With a whole village full of people, I should think you could!" said Gail. "The trouble with you is, Clarry, you're lazy." She leaned back herself in a long chair as she said it, looking the personification of indolence.

"Of course I could!" he said scornfully. "My good girl, have you seen the worthy New Englanders in this village? There are some of the most beautiful characters, hereabouts, I was told when I went seeking for chorus-ladies, that ever existed. But they are far from being worn on the outside."

"Laura Ward is coming down over that week, to stay with me," Gail offered.

"Yes, and Laura Ward has played Celia, and is going to have to do it again," stated Clarence. "We can't waste a good dancer like that on the chorus."

John, who was Lord Mountararat, one of Phyllis' two suitors from the House of Lords, was looking out of the window absently, humming under his breath one of his songs:

"It seems that she's a fairy From Andersen's library And we took her for The proprietor Of a Ladies' Seminary!"

One of the unaccountable silences which sometimes fall made every absently-sung word quite audible. As he ended Clarence sprang at him in what would have been a wild embrace if he had not ducked in time.

"Here, don't let your troubles drive you crazy, Rutherford," John protested, holding him off with a strong hand.

"They haven't!" proclaimed Clarence. "But 'them beautiful words!' See here, you dwellers in this happy vale, isn't there a girls' school somewhere adjacent? Why don't we bribe the teachers by making it a benefit for whatever they want—a stained glass window to their founder, or a new laboratory or something—and lift those girls bodily, as a chorus?"

They had been seeking painfully for some worthy object to give the opera for, and so far hadn't been able to find a thing. So his project was greeted joyfully.

"John, as usual, will have to go ask," suggested Allan. "Johnny, old boy, what would we do without your reputation? You physish at that school, and I hear they kiss your very shadow."

"It's probably all they get a chance at," Gail kindly helped John out.

John, who was wildly adored, as a matter of fact, by most of the fifteen-year-olds of the school, said "Nonsense!" sternly.

"Oh, do!" begged Tiddy. Tiddy was Strephon, the leading juvenile, "a fairy down to his waist," and was passionately anxious to have the whole thing go through. "If you will I'll go and see what I can yank out of my old prep school. There ought to be enough boys with changed voices and long legs——"

"Harold Gray, you are inspired!" said Gail, for once shaken out of her indolence. She had taken unto herself the part of Phyllis and was also anxious for the success of "Iolanthe." "And I myself will go with you. I'll go work my rabbit's foot on the masters. There's one over there who has already known my fatal charm."

"You mean the rabbit's foot, or——"

"I mean that one of the masters is in love with me. The classical master. We'll work him," stated Gail brutally.

"If you can make him sell you sixteen boys into slavery your fatal charm has been some use for once," said Clarence, unruffled.

Phyllis and John, who were the most serious-minded of the roomful, saw breakers ahead, but they said nothing.

"My dear, I don't think the way Miss Maddox talks is nice," whispered Mrs. De Guenther, who had taken to Joy as all old ladies did.

"Don't worry, dear," murmured Phyllis from the other side of her. "Other people don't, either. But nobody takes her seriously."

It was a light in Joy's mind on Gail. Nobody took her seriously. She was just a reckless, erratic creature who said and did as she pleased, and paid the penalty. Joy never felt so in awe of Gail again.

"It is a very modern school," said Phyllis to the company in her sweet, carrying voice. "The teachers are quite in favor of esthetic dancing, I know, and I am sure if you had two or three of the teachers in it, too, to look after the girls, there would be no difficulty. I will go and ask, if you like. We need a Leila and Fleta."

"Oh, say, Mrs. Harrington, I thought you were going to be one of those, at least!" protested Tiddy, to whom it seemed a shame that Phyllis' golden loveliness should be wasted. Allan was Lord Tolloller, the other suitor, but Phyllis preferred, she said, to be generally useful. She was practically understudy to every one in the place, having a quick memory and a good ear, and spent her time, besides, hearing parts. Her real reason for not wanting to play was that she was afraid the De Guenthers would be left too much to themselves if she was tied up to rehearsals. Clarence worked every one mercilessly.

She shook her head good-naturedly.

"I shall probably have to take the leading man's part on the night," she told him. "Oh, I forgot it was you, Tiddy—I beg your pardon. Well, Clarence's, then. And until that awful moment, let me be happy in obscurity!"

Joy, who had Iolanthe's long, hard part to learn, and was delighted with the idea, fixed her eyes on the opposite wall and tried to remember what she had to say first. She was staying on by special permission, for the opera. Mrs. Hewitt herself had written Grandmother. Grandfather, very much pleased at the idea that Joy had inherited another form of his own talent, had said she could stay the full week of the performance. As they planned to give it on a Tuesday night, this was almost a week to the good.

"Then it's settled that Mrs. Harrington and Gail, with as many more as are needed, go chorus-hunting tomorrow," said Clarence with finality. "Now we'll start that 'When darkly looms the day' duet. Tiddy, Joy! Look interested, please. Bang the piano, if you don't mind, Mrs. Harrington. Now!"

Joy and Tiddy accordingly burst into song, assisted by Allan and John. Mrs. Hewitt, who had to be very stealthy about coming in, because she had been put out several times for talking in the middle of some exciting moment, slid into a chair beside the De Guenthers, and behaved nobly. She was quite able to be around now, and Joy was beginning to feel that she ought to accede to Phyllis' requests to go back and stay with them a while. The children demanded her daily.

"I do hope the gate receipts will be more than the expenses," Clarence said hopefully in a resting-space. "The last time I got up anything like this we cleared just two dollars. We'd formally dedicated it to a Home for the Aged, in the blessed hope that the directresses would sell tickets enough to fill the hall. But they didn't. They took our two dollars away from us just the same. I always begrudged them that two-spot."

"If you have the girls' school in it that can't happen," Gail reminded him. "They're little demons at ticket-selling."

So next day Phyllis took Joy with her, and also the De Guenthers as an evidence of deep respectability, and they drove over to the school, and actually secured the co-operation of the girls and their teachers. The thing was being so hurried through, as amateur theatricals should be to go well, that the whole thing would be over in two and a half weeks more. As Phyllis was personally very much liked by the principal, there was very little trouble made about it. Indeed, the teachers planned to take notes and borrow costumes, and give the thing themselves as a commencement entertainment the next June, if it proved possible.

The boys were rather harder to get, but here, too, they succeeded, finally. And "Iolanthe" went prosperously on.

In a couple more days Phyllis, who really could get almost anything she wanted from almost anybody, if she took the trouble, coaxed Joy back from Mrs. Hewitt.

"You'll have her most of the rest of your natural life," she pleaded. "And I saw her first. I think I ought to have her now."

So Mrs. Hewitt reluctantly gave her up, and she went back to the Harrington house.

She saw scarcely less of John, because he continued to come regularly to see them in the mornings on his way home, and generally got in a little visit in the afternoons, not counting the fact that he took her on his rounds with him three days out of five. And then, of course, there were the rehearsals.

"My dear," he remonstrated with her, as they were on their way home from one of these, "I don't want to seem to scold you, but you shouldn't let young Gray put his arm around you the way he does."

"Put his arm around me?" demanded Joy, quite honestly surprised. "Why, what do you mean? Oh—the rehearsals! Why—why, John! You and Allan have to put your arms around Gail every little while, and so does everybody else. And I'm supposed to be Strephon's mother. People have to, in theatricals."

"Clarence seems to think so," said John dryly, and Joy turned her head to look at him more closely in the moonlight.

"And now Clarence! Little Philip Harrington does, too, and I suppose you'll be telling me to have him stop next!"

But at the scorn in her voice John only became firmer.

"Gail Maddox is entirely different," he explained. It seemed to Joy that if he had offered her that explanation once he had a hundred times.

"Gail is not different," said Joy firmly. "Anyway, Tiddy is just a baby."

John could not help laughing.

"He's not the only one who is just a baby," he said. "You little goose, he's three or four years older than you ... and heaven knows how much younger than I am." The thought of that, for some strange reason, worked a change in his mind. "Never mind me, little girl. I suppose I'm unreasonable."

"Well, yes, I think you are," said Joy honestly. Then she laughed. It was very comfortable to have John jealous, even if it was silly of him. "All right, John, hereafter I will wear a wire cage whenever I have any scenes with Tiddy."

"Better wear it when you have scenes with Clarence," said John rather sharply. "And let me tell you, a man that will try to steal——"

"Oh, nonsense!" said Joy calmly again. "First you say that Clarence is toying with me, then you say he's trying to steal me. Now it stands to reason he can't do both."

She was so practical about it that John stopped in spite of himself.

"I'm afraid I'm too much given to thinking people want to steal you," he said a little soberly.

Joy wondered for the thousandth time about the nature of men.... Sometimes she almost thought she had made John care a good deal for her. And then again, when he rose up and defended Gail, she quite thought she hadn't. But as for Clarence, all that was very foolish. From the time she had seen him every one in the village who had come near her, it seemed to her, had carefully made it plain that Clarence was a male flirt, a love pirate, a gay deceiver, a trifler, a person with no intentions—anything but a man who was in love with her. He had practically said so himself, as far as she could remember. And she had been very pleased with the idea, and enjoyed his behavior—happy in the belief that everything he said had a stout string to it—very much. Even John admitted that he was amusing, and certainly he was good-looking and clever.

But she smiled up at John.

"It is very nice of you to feel that way," she said. "I appreciate it."

"You annoying little person!" he replied, half-laughing. "Joy, if I hadn't learned that you were one of the most honest, straightforward girls in the world, sometimes I would think you were a good deal of a coquette."

"We're here," said Joy irrelevantly for an answer. She still wished she knew more about men.

Phyllis' remark about being useful seemed to be in a fair way to be fulfilled. Allan threatened to put out a sign, he said, on the front gate, "No coaching done between twelve and three A.M." Finally he did discover an excellent scheme, which consisted of making the house and garden look deserted, and locking himself and Phyllis in the library most of the day.

"It's rather pleasant," he informed her. "Since I developed this plan I'm really getting more of your uninterrupted society than I have since this terrible "Iolanthe" devastated the village.... Just why did it happen, Phyllis—have you any idea?"

"Speak lower," said Phyllis. "I'm perfectly certain I heard footsteps."

"Probably a deputation from Miss Addams' school, to ask you whether the right or left foot comes first," her husband answered her quite accurately.

"But, Allan dear," protested Phyllis, "you know perfectly well that if I don't go out and stem the tide they will find Joy, and tear the child away from the first moment she's had with John alone since I don't know when."

"This is the first moment I've had alone with you since I don't know when," he answered, unmoved, coming over and putting both arms around her, to draw her resolutely away from the door. "And if you will consider carefully, my darling, you will remember that Joy is much younger than either of us, and hence has many more years to spend with John than you have with me. Now cease to be a slave to duty, or whatever it is, and come sit on the arm of my chair."

"You'll never grow up!" said Phyllis protestingly; but she ceased to be a slave to duty immediately, and sat on the arm of his chair until he pulled her down on his lap, which he did almost on the spot.

Meanwhile Joy, walking up and down in the garden paths and memorizing her part, had been found by John, who was trying to lure her off for a ride.

"Nobody can find us on a galloping car," he said persuasively.

But Joy was more steadfast than Phyllis.

"I expect Tiddy over to rehearse with me," she said. "He will be here in about five minutes. You know that 'Good morrow, good mother' thing that he has to do prancing in and playing on a pipe. And none of us can make out what a pipe is. Tiddy says if there's no further light on it by next rehearsal he's going to use a meerschaum."

"You might let me rehearse with you," grumbled John. "Every time I come near I find you dancing hand-in-hand with Tiddy or Clarence or Mrs. Beeson" (Mrs. Beeson was the gigantic Fairy Queen) "or sewing on some wild thing for some seminary child."

"Some of those seminary children are only a year younger than I am," she reminded him. "But if you would like to rehearse your part with me you'll have to go find Allan. All your scenes are with him."

"Allan has a well-trained wife and a lock on his door," said John, who didn't in the least need to rehearse. "I have neither. Mother has made our house a happy hunting-ground, and at this moment Gail and Tiddy and Clarence are putting the Chorus of Peers through its paces. They aren't properly hand-picked. One of 'em squeaks."

"They had to pick him, because he was so grand and tall," Joy explained. "He isn't supposed to sing. I suppose he got carried away."

"Suppose you get carried away," coaxed John, returning to the charge.

"Now, John, you know the thing is to be given in a week," remonstrated Joy. "And I have heaps to learn, and any amount more to sew."

"Nevertheless—" said John, and suddenly laughed and tried to pick her up. He was very strong, and she was light and little, but she resisted valiantly. They were laughing and struggling like a couple of children, when they heard footsteps, and shamefacedly composed themselves to look very civilized. The choruses were all over the village at all times of the day and night after study hours, and John specially had to look after his decorum in their presence. But it was only Philip.

"Seems to me it would be pleasanter," he remarked without preface, "if Angela and I had parts in this play. Angela thinks so, too."

"Where is Angela?" asked Joy idly.

"I put her up a tree," said Philip. "She's playing she's a little birdie. You haven't got any candy that we could play was worms, have you, Johnny?" he finished insinuatingly.

But John and Joy had heard a wail in the direction whence Philip had come, and neither of them stopped to reply. Angela alone and up a tree was a picture that had appalling possibilities, and she was certainly crying as if the worst of them had happened.

The wails seemed to come from the little pleasance where the fountain was, and Joy, as she ran, had a vision of a tree which Philip did climb with a ladder, and which he was quite capable of making Angela climb, too. The drop from his favorite limb was quite six feet.

Joy reached the pleasance first. It was Angela who was shrieking, but the worst had not quite happened. She had wriggled herself out of the safe crotch where Philip had put her, and it was Heaven's mercy that she had not fallen. But her frock was a stout blue gingham, fortunately, and a projecting branch-stump was thrust through it, holding her in a horizontal position along the bough. She was crying and wriggling, and in another minute or so she might have fallen to the ground. There was a slight chance that she would have struck on the fountain.

Joy was up the ladder and had the child in her arms in a moment. She held her till John, reaching up from below, relieved her of the burden, and set Angela on the grass, where she continued to cry.

"Such a lot of crying about just a little hole in your frock!" remarked Philip to Angela. "I should think you'd be ashamed!"

At which Angela stopped crying.

"Big hole!" she said defensively, with a gulped-down sob, and began smoothing it down, where she sat on the grass.

"Angela, Angela! Oh, Angela, is my baby hurt?" cried Phyllis, flying in from the garden path outside. She had heard the child cry, from where she and Allan were in the living-room, and with a mother's instinct had fled out and down to where the child was. Allan was hurrying behind her, but before he could catch her she had caught her foot on the root that stood out of the ground in a loop, and fallen headlong, striking her head on the edge of the marble basin.

She lay, white and still, where she had fallen. Allan was at her side in a moment, begging her to speak to him.

"Is she dead, John?" he demanded passionately of John, kneeling beside her. "Good God, man, can't you speak—is she dead?"

"She's stunned," John answered. "I think that's all."

"Her heart is beating," said her husband, with his hand on it. "I—I think it is. Oh, Phyllis, darling, won't you speak to me?"

Joy put her hand quietly on his shoulder.

"Allan," she said, "John can't do anything as long as you won't let him get near Phyllis. He can help quicker than you can."

Allan shivered a little, then raised Phyllis so that her head rested on his knee, and John could get at her.

"Do something quickly, John," he said. "I shall go crazy if she lies that way much longer. It's the first time I ever asked her for anything that she didn't give it to me—" his throat caught.

"She'll be all right in a minute, old fellow. Don't take it that way," John reassured him. "Joy, dear, run to the house and get some brandy and spirits of ammonia, and a spoon. Hurry."

Joy sped back to the house, and got the things from Lily-Anna, who unlocked and found with quick, capable hands, though she was evidently trying not to cry as she did it.

"Jus' a natural-born angel," she said. "Here, hurry back, Miss Joy. Yas, that kind's too good to live. I might a' knowed it long ago. There's everything, child. Now go on!"

It had seemed forever to Joy, but John assured her that she had been very swift. They forced a little of the stimulant through Phyllis' teeth, and presently her color began to come back.

"There, she's coming round, Allan," said John. "You see there was no need to be so worried."

"It wasn't you," said Allan briefly, then straightway forgot everything else, as Phyllis' eyes opened.

"I'm dizzy," she said faintly. Then she saw Allan's face over hers, and farther away the others, grave and anxious, and she smiled. "Why, Allan, you poor boy, I've worried you to death. I'm—sorry—dear."

Her breath came a little hard for a moment, for it had been a bad fall; but she was nearly all right again in a few minutes more, and laughing.

"Allan, if you don't stop looking as if the world had come to an end, I shall faint again, whether I want to or not," she said. "You foolish man, didn't you ever see anything like that before?"

"The world nearly did come to an end," said Allan in a low voice.

She made no answer to this in words, but Joy saw her catch Allan's hand and hold it hard for a moment before the men helped her to rise to her feet. She was perfectly able to walk, she declared, after standing a moment and recovering from the dizziness that came over her for a moment when she got up. She went back to the house with Allan's arm around her, and the children, whom nobody had as yet taken time to scold, following, awestruck and very meek, at a safe distance behind.

"He did act as if the world had come to an end," mused Joy aloud. "I was frightened for a minute, though."

"You didn't show it. You were very brave and clear-headed," John told her comfortingly.... "I don't know that I'd have behaved very differently in his place. As he said, it wasn't I."

"Oh, was that what he meant?" said Joy. "I didn't quite know."

"Thank heaven it wasn't!" said John.



CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE SLIGHTLY SURPRISING CLARENCE

Phyllis was perfectly all right the next day. She stayed in the hammock because Allan made her, and she confessed to a shadow of a headache, but altogether, she said, her accident was worth much less fuss than was made over it. The rehearsals swept relentlessly on, past all stemming. Clarence was getting thinner under the strain, which was very becoming, and pleased him exceedingly.

Joy, too, was a little affected by the current of things. In all Clarence's off moments he was either with her or trying to be, and she could not at all make him out. If he had been anybody else she would have thought he was very much in earnest about trying to make her marry him. But, then, John, when she came to think of it, could have been described the same way. A bit of Gail's careless wisdom, dropped one day at rehearsal, gave her a clue to things. Gail had been stating to one of the teachers, who played Fleta, one of the leaders of the chorus, that she'd had four proposals that summer. Gail's attitude of cynical frankness about her desire to collect scalps was something to make the average person gasp. She really meant it. She was, as Joy had discovered by this time, quite without malice—also quite without considerateness.

"It isn't difficult," said Gail to the stiffening teacher. "Competition is the soul of trade. If I can give the poor souls an idea that other men want me—quite flaunt them, you know—they all come bounding up to want me, too. It's very cheering, don't you think, to have a faithful hound or so about?"

Fortunately the teacher was called away by the exigencies of her part, just at that moment. Joy, who was not easily shocked by Gail, having spent nearly four weeks in her immediate vicinity now, lingered. She had an inquiring mind.

"Do you think that really is true, Gail, or were you just trying to shock Miss Archinard?" she asked.

Gail laughed, her peculiar short, low laugh, that, like everything she said and did, had something a little mocking in it. It was curiously at variance with her boyishness. You could not say she was masculine, but there was a something stripped away from her which most people class as feminineness. Joy wondered if it was softness she missed—pity, perhaps, or tenderness. She was, at least, brilliant to the last degree when she talked, though it was a perfectly useless brilliance. Gail's life had no other end than amusing herself with whatever persons or things came her way. If they could be laughed at or employed in her service that was all she wanted.

"Shocking Miss Archinard is a pathetic sort of performance," said Gail. "Any child can do it. You doubtless do yourself. Joy, she probably thinks your coloring too vivid for ladylikeness. Why, I'm perfectly willing to shock her—it's more interesting than talking to her as an equal—but I merely told the truth. You never in the world would have robbed me of the faithful Tiddy who now crawls at your feet, if he hadn't seen John and Clarence running frantically in your direction."

That principle, it dawned on Joy, could be extended. Probably John and Clarence kept each other interested. There was a great deal to learn about men, but on the other hand, there seemed to be a few broad elementary rules to follow—if you were the kind of person who could be cold-blooded enough to follow them.

"But don't you ever feel badly when you think how they get hurt?" she asked Gail a little timidly.

"Everybody gets hurt once or twice that way," said Gail placidly. "I might as well have the satisfaction of doing it as some other girl." She looked reflectively across at her week-end man, who was just now wrestling with his solo, and obviously wanted to get back to her. "Besides—if you don't hurt you get hurt.... Oh, I was a good, sweet, unselfish, considerate young thing once. I wasted much valuable time trying to be as nice as I could be.... Then I got hurt, and I decided that there wasn't anything in this consideration game. People seem to like me just as well now I'm perfectly selfish as they did when I wasn't."

She laughed a little again, and lifted an eyebrow imperceptibly toward Private Willis, who promptly lost a bar of his solo.

It was a difficult statement to correct without being rude. Joy let it go. For the first time in her acquaintance with Gail she had the key. She felt sorry for Gail for a moment—for that far-off childish Gail who had been so badly hurt that she hadn't ever dared let herself feel again. She did not know such a great deal about living herself, but she felt that Gail was wrong—that it was better to let things come to you and hurt you, if they would, and go on living, being a complete human being, no matter what happened to you.

Then Gail spoke again, and Joy discovered that it was difficult to go on being sorry for her—for the present her, that is.

"When you go back to your well-known grandparents," she stated with a frankness which had ceased to mislead Joy, "I shall make a final effort to ensnare John. He doesn't approve of me, but that will make life still more exciting. You don't mind, my child, do you?"

Joy laughed.

"You may have him—if you can get him!" she answered very gallantly considering the circumstances.

What Gail said showed her something with a certainty which had been lacking before. John had never belonged to Gail. If Joy herself hadn't been so entirely in love with John she might have been made surer of him. But it is very hard to be positive of getting anything you want too intensely.

As she rested silent a moment John himself came up beside her.

"Tired, kiddie?" he said with the affectionate note in his voice that he always had when he used the little name he had for her. "You should have farmed out that sewing."

"Do you mean to say you took a bundle of those gauze frocks to do, Joy?" demanded Gail.

Joy nodded. Gail made her feel, as usual, as if she had been silly and imposed upon. The seminary girls were crowding their time as it was to get in the rehearsals, and the Principal had stated with finality that it would be impossible to give them time extra to work on their costumes. The mothers of some of them had been written home to and had responded, but some others of the girls had no one who could or would do the sewing, so Joy had volunteered, together with Phyllis, to run up the five or six of them that had to be done. She was a little tired.

"I shall come over tomorrow morning and hide them," John threatened. But he smiled approvingly at her as he said it, and she knew that he liked her having done it. She knew well enough the long hours he spent with his charity patients, and all the things he did for the people in the village—things he never spoke of.

She thought with a pang that was not a selfish one of John's lot, if he did finally marry Gail. She did not think he could be happy with a girl who would never try to make him so. His mother's affection for him was irresponsible enough, but it was very real and selfless. You couldn't imagine Gail married to John.

"It'll be too late to hide them," she answered him brightly, coming out of her muse with an effort. "They're all done. There wasn't much work on them, comparatively."

"Good morrow, good mother, Good mother, good morrow! By some means or other, Pray banish your sorrow!"

sang Tiddy, frisking gently up to her. "It's our turn next, Joy. Clarence says he thinks we ought to emigrate in a body to the Opry House, and go through this thing right."

John moaned.

"Clarence is always having unnecessary thoughts of that sort. To hear him talk, you would think we had spent the last two weeks going through it wrong."

"So we have," said Clarence. "Come now—all out. We are going over to rehearse on the august boards of the opera house, and then we are going home for brief bites, and then we are going back for a dress rehearsal. Tomorrow night is the night, and may the Lord have mercy on your souls!"

At this reminder Clarence's weary company bestirred itself. The principals had been rehearsing, as usual, at the Hewitt house. They were to meet the chorus, it appeared, at the village opera house, and go through the whole thing there with the orchestra of tomorrow night; a kind-hearted orchestra which was willing to rehearse twice.

"Why any of us ever began this thing, I don't see," growled John, as he deftly captured Joy, having made a neat flank movement which prevented Clarence from getting her. "Do you know, Joy"—he was putting her cloak on for her in the hall by this time—"I've seen about half as much of you as I would if I hadn't been lured into this. The rest of this week, after tomorrow night, you are going to have to spend exclusively in spoiling me. I'm twice as deserving as a high-school girl, and three times as deserving as Clarence and Tiddy. And I've more right to you, besides."

"If you want rights, sometimes you have to take them," said Joy demurely.

He laughed.

"Is that a suggestion? If so, it's an excellent one. Consider yourself thoroughly taken. You are not to be discovered in corners with Clarence, nor showing Tiddy how his steps should go."

But Joy only laughed.

There was little time for discussion after that. They rehearsed steadily, with the frenzied feeling of unpreparedness that only amateurs can fully know, till it was more than time for the "brief bite" of Clarence's description. Then the choruses were shepherded over to the Hewitt house and the Maddox house respectively, and fed, Clarence and Tiddy standing over them to see that no time was wasted.

Then they went back, and went through the whole opera. The audience consisted of a few carefully chosen relatives who had insisted on being there, including the Harrington children. Phyllis was letting them see the dress rehearsal instead of the real performance, because the latter was to end with a dance, and there would have been some difficulty in tearing Philip away while things were still going on. The dress rehearsal promised to be over by nine-thirty, for they had started at six, and were sweeping through without a break, happily unconscious that Clarence intended them to do it all over again with all the mistakes severely corrected, as soon as they had ended the final chorus.

"Gail, that isn't the way to do it," Clarence called to her sharply, as she danced in with the minimum of effort, in the "Good morrow, good mother" song that she had with Joy and Tiddy, respectively Iolanthe and Strephon. "Pick up your feet. You'll be down over that garland in the corner if you don't look out."

"I'll pick them up tomorrow night," said Gail, pausing to answer him. "No use putting all this work on rehearsal."

She was undoubtedly right. And undoubtedly the garland had no business to swing so loose, as Clarence himself afterwards admitted.

But the fact remained. As Gail stepped reluctantly back, and recommenced her song, her high-heeled slipper caught in the swinging garland, and she came down flat, with the ankle badly turned under her.

The opera stopped short while the others crowded around her and tried to find out how badly she was hurt. She sat up straight and tried to smile-Gail disliked having or showing feelings of any sort—but she was white with the pain, and when she tried to stand on the ankle it hurt her, as she admitted.

They carried her off the stage in a chair, and John, who was donning his robes in the other dressing-room, was hurried over to see how badly she was hurt.

"Don't stop for me, Clarence," Gail ordered. "On with the dance, let Joy be unrefined. That is, if she can. I know you're hungering to lash your wretched infant-school forward."

Clarence remarked that she was plucky, patted her shoulder, and went thankfully off to put his chorus through an evolution or so while he could.

John, meanwhile, with Phyllis' help, took off the pretty pink satin slipper, with its rosette, and the pink silk stocking, and found that Gail's ankle was badly sprained. They did it up properly, and Phyllis took Gail home.

"Now what shall we do?" demanded Clarence at the end of the act, pushing the Lord Chancellor's wig to one side, and staring around him.

"What about Gail's guest, the one that's coming down tomorrow?" offered Tiddy.

"We have her cast, anyway," Clarence answered dolefully.

"She's played Celia, the one that's a sort of lieutenant-fairy, before, and I remember the time I had getting her to memorize her words—not a long part at all. She could no more play Phyllis than I can."

"Were you talking about the part, or about me?"' asked Phyllis Harrington, coming in again.

"How is Gail?" asked everybody.

"Ask John," said Phyllis. "Her ankle seems to be hurting her badly, poor girl. I hope it will be all right tomorrow night. I made her go to bed, and her mother is sworn to make her stay there. I'll go through her part for her now, Clarence, if it will be any help."

Clarence stared at her.

"Can you?" he asked.

"Well, I know the words," said Phyllis. "And I don't think she will be able to rehearse again. It will be as much as she can do to get up tomorrow night and go through it."

John shook his head. "I'm afraid she won't be able to do even that," he said.

"Then you'll have to take the part, Phyllis!" said Clarence with a sudden decision. "Never mind dressing now. Take your hat off and see what you can do."

"Understand, I'm only holding it," said Phyllis, but she would have been more than human if she had not flushed a little with pleasure at the idea.

They began rehearsals again, and this time the opera went through with scarcely a hitch. The little chorus girls had come to adore Phyllis by this time, the boys were fond of her—there was scarcely one of the cast whom she had not helped over or through or under some one of the little hitches incident to private theatricals—and the whole cast was on its tiptoes to see her through. There was a new feeling in the thing, that Clarence noticed directly.

"By Jove, we ought to have insisted on her doing it from the first," he told Tiddy, his lieutenant, under his breath. "I could have gotten twice as much work out of 'em.'

"Who'd have broken the news to Cousin?" he wanted to know.

Clarence eyed him with the detached interest that was his, and meditated with a certain amusement on the changeableness of college boys. Two weeks before Tiddy would have lowered his voice in reverence at Gail's name. Then he glanced across at Joy, sitting close by Phyllis in her gauzes, with her wonderful bronze-gold hair hanging around her like a mantle, and conceded within himself that it was not so surprising after all.

Sure enough, Gail was unable to bear much weight on her foot by the next day. She insisted on being dressed and driven down to the hurried last rehearsal on the afternoon of the performance. But she could not walk without support.

"You'll have to take it, Phyllis," she conceded. "I shall look as beautiful as I can, and sit in the audience and hate you."

"You ought to," said Phyllis mournfully. "I know if it were I in your place, I couldn't bear to come down and look at you."

"I have to, anyway, on account of Laura," said Gail. Miss Ward had come, and was at that moment getting out of her wraps preparatory to meeting the cast and rehearsing.

As Phyllis left her to go into the dressing-room and introduce the stranger, whom she had met, to the others, she heard Joy cry out in surprise.

"Why, I know you—at least I've seen you, only you don't remember me," Joy was saying impulsively.

Laura Ward, in the act of slipping off her coat, stopped in surprise.

"Why, I have seen you" she said. "Where was it?"

"I was posing for the Morrows," explained Joy. "You ran in and got some fixative. They had me for their mural decorations——"

"Joy!" called somebody in the tone of imperative need which is almost as summoning as a telephone bell, and Joy dashed off, holding up her green water-weeds with one hand and her draperies with the other. The meeting with Laura Ward seemed a pleasant sort of crowning to the day. She was the very same vivid, gipsy-looking girl who had dashed into the Morrow studio for a moment, and who had seemed to stand, to Joy then, for all the kinds of girl she had wanted to be and couldn't. And now she seemed just a pleasant person like oneself. Joy had caught up to her. It was like an omen.

"What is it?" she called dutifully as she ran.

She found no opportunity to see more of Miss Ward. She wanted to, for she was sure she was going to like her. She had always wanted to.

"It's a good audience," breathed Clarence over her shoulder, as they looked through peep-holes in the curtain. "All the sisters and cousins and aunts have turned up. I say, Joy, the Fairy Queen was good for ten tickets at least. There's a row of her dear ones right across from aisle to aisle."

The moment of the play had come all too swiftly, and in ten nerve-shattering minutes the curtain would go up. Ten minutes after that Joy would be rising out of a trap-door, in the character of a fairy who had spent the last twenty years at the bottom of a stream; incidentally she would be acting for the first time in her life. There was enough to be excited over; and yet it was none of these things that excited her—it was the curious note in Clarence Rutherford's voice as he spoke his trivial words in her ear.

She moved away from him automatically. She was a little tired, tonight, of his persistent flirtation. It was all very well for a while, but surely—surely, she thought, it was time he'd had enough of it; and she went back off the stage, looking, though she scarcely acknowledged it to herself, for John. She felt as if she wanted to see as much of him as she could.

He ought to have been in his dressing-room, but he was not. He was looking for her, she almost thought, for he came quickly toward her with his face lighted.

"I'm so glad I found you before the thing commenced, kiddie," he said. "I just wanted to tell you that you're not to be frightened. Do you hear? I forbid you to be frightened." He smiled down at her protectingly. "You say you always do as I tell you—so you must this time. I know you're going to make a howling success of the opera.... My dear, don't look so worried about it all!"

They were in a little dim passage where no one was likely to come, and he drew her close to him, and kept his arm around her.

"Do I look worried?" she answered simply. "I wasn't thinking about 'Iolanthe' so much. I suppose I'm tired with rehearsals, for it seems to me as if something I didn't like was going to happen.... John, I never asked you before, but I feel so little and lonesome tonight, and suddenly far away from everybody. Please say that you haven't minded all the naughty things I've done—that you like me, and forgive me, and——"

"Like you and forgive you, foolish child! ... I don't know that I like you...." He looked down at her, laughingly. "And I have nothing to forgive you for. Why, Joy, it goes a great deal further than that. I thought you knew how much I cared for you."

She clung to him, there in her green and white draperies, with her gold hair falling over them. She could scarcely believe the thing his words and voice said, but it was there to believe. She gave a little shiver and clung closer to him.

"You—care?"

"Of course I care!"

He released her enough to lift up her flushed little face, and bend down and kiss it. "You knew that a long time ago. Kiddie——"

It was just then that the call-bell rang.

She hurried to her place, her heart beating and her cheeks burning under the rouge. She was nearly sure that she had won—that the wishing ring had given her what she had asked of it. John had not said, "You and I are lovers, and we are going to be married" in so many words—but his voice—and his touch—and his laughing certainty——

She was very happy, so happy that she went through the opera in the state of some one drugged to ecstasy. She sang and danced and laughed, and helped Phyllis whenever she could in her difficult task of assuming a leading part at one day's notice, and felt as if the play had carried her into a veritable fairyland. Tiddy forgot half of his lines, the first time he spoke with her, watching her brilliant eyes and vividness, and she laughed and pulled him through. She was like a flame throughout the performance. Phyllis did wonders, considering the short time she had had in which to prepare, and the performance generally was so good that even the people who were in it were surprised.

When it was safely over, and the dance was beginning—the dance was taking place at the Hewitt house—Joy flung herself down for a moment behind the curtains of the little alcove she knew so well by now, and caught her breath. She was hiding a little. She still had a curious reluctance to see Clarence again, and she felt as if she did not want to see John, either, for a little while. Because the next time she saw him she would probably know whether she was right or wrong. She was nearly certain she was right, but there was a little shivering possibility that she might not be. There was always Gail!...

"Sorcerette, dear!" said Clarence's voice wooingly in the dim doorway.

He had changed back to evening clothes, and looked very handsome, if a little theatrical, for the black was not quite yet off his brows and lashes. He, too, looked excited.

"Come out and dance, Joy of my life," he said.

"I'm—I'm waiting for John," she stammered. She still did not want to go with him.

"John's otherwise engaged," Clarence informed her coolly. "Did you think Gail intended to go without one kind word the whole evening? Not so! Come, or I'll think you mean to be highly impolite."

The same reluctance still held Joy's feet, and she did not like the insinuation, but there really seemed no way out.

"Cheer up, Sorcerette, dear," he said in her ear, as he swept her away. "'Get happy, chile, ain't you done got me?'"

She did not talk. She did not feel like it. She merely danced lightly on with Clarence, letting him say what he pleased.

"Do you remember the first time we danced together, Joy, the first time you ever danced with any one? I have always been so glad I was the first man you ever danced with."

"Why?" she asked absently. She wanted to get away, to get back to John Hewitt.

His arms tightened.

"Why? You know perfectly well why. You have got me—do you know it? From the very first minute I ever saw you."

She smiled up at him, and shook her head.

"You make love beautifully," she heard herself saying coolly. "But you really shouldn't make it to your host's fiancee in his house. It isn't done."

"Don't you suppose I know that?" answered Clarence tempestuously. "Joy Havenith, do you mean to say that you think I'm doing the ordinary love-making one does in any conservatory?"

She smiled a little. He was more like the Clarence she usually knew, and she did not take it at all seriously.

"Why, you do it better than most," she said. "Go on. I like it."

If there was one thing she knew well, it was Clarence's love-making. Indeed, she had come to the point where Clarence's remarks scarcely constituted love-making at all in her eyes. They were merely his kind of manners, and she was a little tired of them.

"Good heavens! How on earth am I going to convince you?" she heard him say, with a little surprise. This was not the kind of thing he said ordinarily. "Joy, I fell in love with you, the real kind of love, the first night I saw you. You've known it all along. I wish you'd stop pretending not to—I'm getting tired of it. I want to marry you—I'd marry you tonight if you said the word. I'll come over and get you tomorrow and marry you if you'll let me. I don't suppose you will. But I do expect to keep on at you till you do.... Good heaven, child, haven't you seen I was in earnest?" he broke off at the expression of her wide-open eyes.

Joy believed in love at first sight, as she had every personal reason to, but in spite of Clarence's intensity she was not quite convinced. She looked up at him. He was white, and his mouth was tense. And he was holding her like a vise. He was in earnest.

"Maybe—maybe you think you do mean it now." she said breathlessly. "If you do—I'm sorry for you. It isn't nice to be in love unless the other person is, too."

"What do you know about it?" he burst out angrily. "You aren't in love with that virtuous citizen of yours, whether or not he is with you. Let him go back to Gail. She's been considering one of her tame cats for a year, and she'd about decided to marry him when you came along and broke it up. You'd sweep any man off his feet. You and I belong together, Joy darling. I'm going to marry you, if you were engaged to the whole College of Surgeons."

"The dance is over," said Joy a little faintly.

"Then come over here where it's quiet. I haven't finished."

"Oh, please no—" cried Joy, freeing herself from his hold eagerly. This was getting unexpectedly like earnest, and it had been a shock. She did not want to hear any more about how Clarence felt.

She hurried across the floor without waiting for him, to where Allan and Phyllis were still standing together. They had stolen a dance with each other—they danced together altogether too much for married people, anyway, Mrs. Hewitt said.

The atmosphere of happiness and serenity that was about Phyllis was something Joy could always rest in thankfully. Her own moods alternated so that Phyllis' calmness was an especial comfort.

"I—I'm so tired," she said wistfully. "Couldn't we go soon?"

"I should think we could," said Phyllis willingly, while Allan seconded the motion with joy.

"There's no place like home," he said. "I've been considering the fact that it was getting on for four, and that I have an appointment at ten tomorrow, for a half-hour. Go get your wraps, Phyllis, my darling, and I'll get John, as my share of the bargain. We'll be awaiting you happily in a dark corner of the porch."

Joy wanted to flee from Clarence. And she looked forward happily to being with John on the back seat of the motor, and talking over the evening with him. She would learn, perhaps, just what he had meant when he had seen her last. Her heart beat hard with the excitement of the thought. She was nearly sure—dear wishing ring!

She slipped off, after speaking to Mrs. Hewitt, and saw Allan and John moving off together to the men's cloak-room.

She sang softly to herself as she put on her cloak. She would be with John again in a moment. He had smiled at her as he passed out of sight. What were Clarences and such small things? This was a wonderful world.

She and Phyllis came down the stairs together as unobtrusively as they could, so as not to betray to the rest that they were going. She had forgotten about Gail.

But Gail was the first thing she saw—half-lying on a couch in a dark corner of the hall, holding court with Laura Ward. There were two or three men around them, and they were laughing and talking together. Joy waved her hand as they passed, and Gail looked up from her laughter.

"Farewell, my dears, until tomorrow! Good-by, Joy. It was a well-done opera, even if I was sitting in the audience being fiendishly jealous.... Oh, I forgot to tell you that I have learned your dark secret, my child! I think you're the most ingenious little wretch that ever lived. Till tomorrow! I'm going to give a tea—be prepared!"

She looked at Laura Ward and laughed again.



CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE GIFT OF THE RING

Joy had no idea in the world how she got into the car. John's guiding hand on her arm probably was all that saved her from stumbling into the hedge, or trying to walk up a tree, she thought afterwards. She was on the back seat, finally, with John by her. She laid her head back with a little tired half-moan, and felt John's strong, comforting arm drawing her over so that she could rest against his shoulder.

"You poor little girl, you're all worn out," she heard him say tenderly. "But I was proud of you, little Joy. I didn't know what a wonderful person I had found.... Little fairy princess!"

Ten minutes earlier the note of affection and pride in his voice would have made Joy so deliriously happy that she wouldn't have known what to do. But ... Gail knew ... Gail knew all about it all! ... How could men! And she had said she was going to give a tea. That probably meant that she was going to tell everybody everything, and laugh about it.

She was tired, and the shock of Gail's words had taken all the capacity for action out of her. She knew that if she'd had any proper feelings she would have moved coldly away from John, and accused him of betraying her to Gail, and demanded why he had done it. Evidently she had no proper feelings. You can't have, if you love people hard. She merely lay against John's strong, broad shoulder that felt so alive and comforting, and thought that this was the last time she would ever lean against it, or feel, as she always did when he touched her, as if there was some one who would look after her, and stand between her and every one else. She could not talk.

When they reached the Harrington house Allan took the car around to the garage at the back, himself, and Phyllis said she would stay in the car with him while he locked the garage. The men began to tease her for the idea she had offered, but Joy, hearing Phyllis laughingly defend herself, and explain what she really meant, knew that it was Phyllis' way of giving John a chance to say good-night to her alone.

"Dear Phyllis!" she thought, with a gush of gratitude in her heart that there was one person in the world so unfailingly thoughtful and honest and dependable. The world did not quite go down in ruins while Phyllis stood her friend.

"Dear Phyllis!" she heard John's gay voice say, as if in echo of her own thoughts. "She knew I'd want a chance to see you alone a minute.... What an awful amount of people too many there are in the world, aren't there, kiddie? I'm beginning to think with yearning of Crusoe's isle, and a barbed-wire fence around that."

He drew her into the shadow of the vines on the porch, and took her in his arms. ... And he had told Gail ... oh, how could men?

For a moment she stood, passive. Then the nearness of him, and the cruel last-timeness of it all, swept over her again, and she threw her arms around his neck convulsively, and kissed him over and over again. She wanted it to remember.

"Good-by, my dearest!" she whispered.

"Not good-by, dear—good-night!" he answered her. "It's a long time till tomorrow, but thank goodness, it's coming. And all the tomorrows after that."

"No—" she started to say, when she heard footsteps, and John released her.

"It's a very dark night," said Allan sadly. "I couldn't see my best friend, even if he were on my own porch. Coming in, John?"

"Allan, you have the tact of Talleyrand, or whoever it was they used to kick," responded John amiably. "No, I can't come in. It's at least four o'clock, and I have to be up at seven tomorrow. I'll drop in some time in the morning—you won't have a chance to miss me."

He said good-night to them all, and went down from the porch. They could hear him whistling "With Strephon for Your Foe" joyously down the path, and, more dimly, down the road that led to his house.

"There goes, I should say, a fairly happy man," remarked Allan to the world at large. "Now, Joy, if any one asked you, what would you say made him so contented with life?"

Joy liked Allan's brotherly teasing as a rule, but tonight it seemed as if she could not answer him, or anybody. She did, not feel as if she could talk any more, and looked appealingly at Phyllis.

"She's dead to the world, Allan," Phyllis interposed. "And if we stay down here talking those imps of ours are going to wake up and demand tribute."

"Great Scott, they are!" said Allan, "and the buns and stuff you held Mrs. Hewitt up for are in the bottom of the car, locked up in the garage—where you wanted to be."

"Which is providential," said the children's mother thankfully. "It's an alibi. They can't get any till tomorrow, no matter how much we want to give them any."

So they tiptoed up the stairs. Joy turned off into her own room, but she heard enough to know that no soft-footedness had availed. She heard Philip's clear, deliberate little voice demanding, "How much party did you bring me home, Mother?" and the hopeful patter of Angela's feet.

She shut her door tight before she knew how it turned out. She had a good deal to do, because she was going to have to take a train that got her away from Wallraven before John found time from his rounds to come back next morning. Gail might have told Mrs. Hewitt—any number of people—by this time. She did not want to see any of them again. And she loved them all very much.

She took off her frock with slow, careful fingers, and put on a kimono to pack in. Her trunk was against the wall. As she worked steadily over the tissue-paper and hangers and things to be folded, she thought she was beyond feeling anything at all, till she felt something wet on her face, and found that she was crying silently, without having known it in the least.

The green and silver frock—the white top-coat—that had burrs on it, where she had gotten out by the roadside to pick some goldenrod, and John had not gotten them all quite off—the little blue dress with the fichu that John had said made her look as if she belonged in a house instead of a story-book—the gray silk she had loved so, and worn so hard it was middle-age-looking already—the brown wool jersey suit she must travel in——

She laid this last across a chair, and tried to go on packing. That was the frock she had worn when John came to her in the woods, and was so kind, and so good, and told her he would let her have her happy month.... Well, she'd had it. And it was worth it—it was worth anything!

But she put her head down on the side of the trunk and sobbed and sobbed.

Presently she went on with her packing, and finished it by a little after four-thirty. The suitcase had to be filled. When it was done she took a bath and dressed, and lay down on the bed as she was. There was a train at nine-ten, that got her back home late in the afternoon, and she was taking no chances.

She slept a little, always with the nine-ten train on her mind, and finally rose and locked her trunk at half-past seven. She put the key and her ticket and what money she had in her hand-bag, fastened on her cap, took her suitcase, and stole downstairs. Nobody was astir yet but Lily-Anna, and Viola, who was giving the early-waking Angela her breakfast in an informal way in the corner of the kitchen.

"Could I have a cup of coffee in a little while now, Lily-Anna?" she asked the cook, who was making beaten biscuit in an echoing fashion that would have penetrated any but the thick hundred-year-old walls of the kitchen.

"Why, Miss Joy—you goin' off on a ride with Dr. Johnny this early?" inquired Lily-Anna, thinking the natural thing. "Course you can. I'll make it right now. An' I'll tell Mis' Harrington."

Joy had forgotten Phyllis in her wild desire for flight. But she remembered now. She would have to call Phyllis and tell her. Indeed, she would rather tell her herself than have Gail know. She couldn't go off this way, as if she was taking the silver with her.

She retraced her steps up the stairs, opened the door of Phyllis' room softly. Phyllis' bed was near the door, and she sat up at the slight noise. Joy beckoned to her, and she slipped out of bed, flinging around her a blue kimono that lay across the footboard and setting her feet noiselessly in slippers as she came out with the swift, gliding step that was characteristic of her. She gathered back the loose masses of her amber-colored hair and flung them over her shoulder, shut the door softly in order not to disturb Allan, and followed Joy down the hall.

"What is it, dear?" she asked. "Telephone at this unchristian hour?"

"I'm sorry to disturb you," Joy answered, "but I had to. Where can we go where I can talk to you for half an hour—or maybe ten minutes?"

There was a glowing fire in the living-room, and, of old custom, a long couch stood before it. Phyllis led the way downstairs to this, and established Joy on it, drawing a chair up to it herself.

"Now tell me all about it," she said comfortingly. "And lie down, child—you look dead."

But Joy was too nervous to lie down.

"I have to go away on the nine-ten," she said.... "No, please, Phyllis, wait till I tell you, and you'll see I do. You would, too."

Phyllis always took the least nerve-wearing way—you could count on her for that. She listened encouragingly.

"Gail said last night she—she knew my dark secret." Joy began nervously in the middle. "And you know Gail does tell anything about anybody she wants to, especially if she thinks it makes a funny story,—sometimes I think perhaps she likes making people ridiculous.... She doesn't care about feelings...."

"Why, you poor child, have you a dark secret?" asked Phyllis, smiling. "Let me hear the worst. I promise to love you still."

"Oh please do!" implored Joy. She dropped her head on the couch cushions and talked with her face hidden on one arm. "Phyllis, I—I never was engaged to John!"

The bombshell did not at all have the effect she had expected.

"I'm sorry to contradict you, but you certainly are," said Phyllis placidly.

"You don't understand," went on Joy, coming out from her shelter. "Listen."

So she told Phyllis, with both her quivering little hands locked in one of Phyllis' strong, firm ones, the whole story—the story of the shut up, youthless life among the people who came to give her grandfather homage, and regarded her as a plaything or a stage-property, and of how she had seen the two young lovers one wet day, and been stirred into a wild rebellion for a youth of her own.

"I understand," said Phyllis here. "You were 'half-sick of shadows.' I went through that myself. There comes a time when you'd do anything."

"You understand?" asked Joy with wide eyes, "you with a husband that adores the ground you walk on?"

"I do understand," affirmed Phyllis, with her mind flying back for a moment to a gray February day in a Philadelphia library—a day that was eight years old now. "I think I can understand anything you are going to tell me."

But Joy went on to the day when she had hidden on the stairs to get away from the people, and John had come in, with the light glinting on his hair, and catching in the ring on his finger.

"I suppose I fell in love with him then, though I didn't know what it was," Joy confessed. "And when I met you and Philip and Allan I loved you all so, too, and it seemed so queer you liked me—just me, you know, not somebody's granddaughter that he used for trimmings!"

"Who wouldn't?" said Phyllis matter-of-factly. "So far as I can see, most people are crazy over you."

"And Grandfather wouldn't let me go unless I'd been engaged—or he said that was the only reason—he thought I couldn't be, of course. And—and it flew out. And I used John's name when he cornered me, because I remembered him, and how kind he'd been. And on top of that——"

"And on top of that John turned up! Good gracious!" said Phyllis. She could not help a little laugh but her face sobered swiftly. "Think of that man's cleverness and self-control! Why—why, Joy, no man would do all that unless he cared for you a little, anyhow."

"John would," said Joy with conviction. "You know how he is about honor and courtesy and doing things for people."

Phyllis nodded. That was an incontrovertible fact.

"And he's told Gail," Joy went on. "That's the only secret I ever had in my life, so it must be that. So I'm going to run away. I simply can't stay and..."

"Told Gail! Ridiculous!" cried Phyllis. "Unless ... unless——"

"Unless there was some understanding between them before and John was simply overchivalrous when he helped me," Joy finished steadily. "Yes, that's the only answer.... I'm going. Please don't forget me."

"You foolish child!"

"There's another reason," Joy added. "Clarence proposed last night. I'd be almost sure to say 'yes' to save my face about the other thing, if I stayed, and I might have to marry him if I did.... Queer that Clarence, that I and everybody knew was just a plain flirt, should really want to, and John not!" she added absently. "Good-by."

She was off the couch and had hurried out of doors, where Phyllis, half-clad as she was, could not follow her.

Phyllis rose and went to the door, but the little slim brown figure was already going swiftly toward the station, her suitcase swinging in her hand.

It occurred to Phyllis as she walked over to the telephone that usually crises found her clad in a blue negligee of some sort. Then she got Dr. Hewitt's number.

"Is that you, John Hewitt?" she called. "Come over to this house this moment! ... Yes, something serious has happened. And don't ask for Allan—ask for me. I'll be on the porch waiting for you if I can. If not, stay there and wait for me. This is private—and—yes, about Joy! Come!"

Joy got the train with a desolately long interval of waiting at the station. It was a day-coach. She had all the time in the world to think things out. Her grandparents were back in the city house, she knew. They would be glad to see her in their different ways, she knew that, too. She could drop into her niche noiselessly, with scarcely a question from Grandfather, and all the lovingness in the world from Grandmother, except if Grandfather needed attention. The old gowns were still in her closet.... When she got home it would be reception day!