Clarence smiled most agreeably.

"You should try to be more of an optimist, dear Joy," he reproved. "Try to live up to your name."

"I got it out of Blake," said Joy, "or they did—and I never did see why you should live up to a name your grandfather pinned on you out of a poetry book."

"Pardon this seeming curiosity," hinted Clarence, "but didn't you ever have any parents, not even to the extent of their having a chance to name you?"

"They died before I was born," Joy explained. "At least, as much as they could. My father quite did and my mother died before I was a week old. So Grandfather had it all to do, as far as naming went. You know that horrid poem—

"I have no name—
I am but three days old:"

"And it's called Infant Joy, and so was I."

"They seem to have begun wrecking your taste for literature early," observed Clarence.

"Oh—literature!" said Joy wearily.

"Your tone hints that we didn't come off to discuss the poets. You are quite right, Sorcerette. When two charming young persons like ourselves are alone together on a wonderful fall afternoon they should discuss only each other. And you must admit that my references to literature were only incidental to yourself."

"Well, anyway," stated Joy, pausing as they strolled, and beginning to braid into a garland a handful of wild asters she had gathered, "anyway, I ought to go back to the house and help Gail get dinner. John likes things just so."

"Heavens, how marital!" sighed Clarence, wincing. Then suddenly he seemed more in earnest than Joy had ever known him. "Can't you ever talk or think of anything but the admirable John? How on earth did he get you so thoroughly broken in?"

Joy's cheeks flamed.

"He didn't 'break me in,'" she defended. "But I think I ought to see to it that things are all right. You see, when your cousin came and offered to take over the housekeeping—if she wasn't your cousin, I might say she got it away from me—she thought she was helping herself to a 'nice, clane, aisy job,' as the Irishman said about being a bishop. It really isn't fair to let her in for work she didn't expect."

The look Clarence bent on her this time held genuine admiration.

"I think it is exceedingly fair," was all he said.

"Really?" she asked. She certainly did not want to go back to the house, and, noble as Clarence might think her, she didn't feel a bit like taking orders from Gail.

"She has made her bed—or it may even be, her beds," said Clarence. "Now why don't you let her lie in it, or them?"

"Well, I don't want to go home," said Joy a little sadly.

"Let us be optimists, as I suggested some yards back," said Clarence cheerfully. "Let us think of the wonderful effect it will all have on Gail's moral nature. By the time she has produced the eight-course dinner which I gather the worthy Dr. Hewitt requires to keep him the good citizen he is, she will be ennobled to a terrible degree. You have heard of the ennobling influence of toil, dear child?"

"I have, but I never believed in it," said Joy. "It makes you cross, especially peeling potatoes, and it's bad for your hands. And judging by the number of maids who steal, it doesn't work at all."

"I suppose," Clarence resigned himself, "that if Melisande were still spared to us in the flesh, she really would have talked this way, except that she would have used a few more dots. But one is an idealist. One is jarred. If you could recite, in your soft, clear-cut voice that is so admirably adapted for poetry, a few stanzas of something heartbreaking——" voluntarily.

Joy, not unnaturally, lost patience.

"I have spent my whole life, or a lot more of it than I want to, reciting heartbreaking poetry," she told him. "If you want it, go buy a phonograph record. And if you want me out here in the woods with you, stop talking about it!"

She really shouldn't have been so cross. Clarence was supposed to be very clever when he talked. But just then she was only half listening to him, and there came a sudden vision of the night before—the cozy room, and the wood fire, and John across from her, smiling gravely at her, and talking in a way that didn't make her feel, as Clarence's way did, that he was laughing at her underneath, when he thought she couldn't see.

John had told her once that his ideal girl wore something white or blue, and had her hair parted, and was connected in his mind some way with a wood fire. And he had talked and acted as if she was that girl. She'd had on the little blue dress that she'd bought, and made look modern with a fichu of Mrs. Hewitt's....

Clarence's voice interrupted her thoughts, rather plaintively.

"Dear Joy! I will buy a phonograph record! I will buy a whole album of them. I will purchase a copy of the Last Ravings of John McCullough, and have it rave to me the last thing every night, as a penance, if you will only stop looking off into space, and give at least a fair imitation of knowing that I exist."

Joy's heart misgave her. She really wasn't being very polite.

"Of course you exist," she said penitently. "And you are very nice and polite, in your way, and you must make allowance for my not being clever. I keep telling you that all the time."

"I am delighted that you are not, as you call it, clever," said Clarence with undoubted sincerity. "You lack verbal dexterity of a certain kind, because you have never associated freely with people you could be disrespectful to. But you are quite a new kind of girl, or else a survival, and I adore you for it. I never thought I was going to adore any one so much. Why, I even think it is humorous when you sit on me, and that, my dear, is a very bad symptom. In short, I am very much in love with you."

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?"