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 a.s.sured 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!

CHAPTER SEVEN

A VERY CHARMING GENTLEMAN

"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. n.o.body 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 ma.s.ses 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-a.s.sured, 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 ent.i.tled 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--s.e.x, male. I knew you wouldn't care--men are a G.o.dsend 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.