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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philip looked up from his book amiably.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She raised her surprising eyes to him demurely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Phyllis took it beautifully.

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

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

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

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

"And were you married at seventeen?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Help yourself." Phyllis granted promptly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Just what way?" he inquired more gently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So you are," said John warmly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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