"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 fiancÉ 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 fiancÉe 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 fiancÉe 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.