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.