The Wishing-Ring Man Part 11

"Good-by, my little girl," she said. "I know Grace Carpenter's boy can't but be good to you. And, darling--she asked me to keep it for a surprise--I only heard this morning--but I know surprises aren't always pleasant--and you're so young, you need to be prepared. Grace wrote me she was greatly surprised by the news, though I'm sure she needn't have expected to be told if we weren't--but she was very sweet about it, and is giving a dance to all the nice people in Wallraven for you. It's set for the evening after you get there. She tells me she has arranged the invitations already, in a way that makes the short notice seem all right. Grace was always so ingenious.... Oh, there's the train--good-by, darling! Be a good girl!"

Joy was aghast.

"_Grandmother!_" she began. "Oh, Grandmother. I have to tell you! ... I--oh, John, tell her! I can't go! I--"

She turned to Hewitt despairingly. But he had not been listening: he had been watching the argument between Philip and the baggageman.

"Hurry, Joy, train's coming," was all he said, and caught her arm, whisking her aboard.

She pulled back, but that made no difference. He had her established in a seat, with what Phyllis called his "genial medical relentlessness,"

in spite of her appeals.

"But I _can't_ go!" she protested weakly from her seat, as the train pulled out of the station.

"But, you see, you have," was John's placidly unanswerable reply, as he stowed his light overcoat on the rack above them and laid her coat over that with maddening precision. He smiled at her protectingly.

"Why, my dear child, what made you lose your nerve that way at the last minute?"

Then Joy understood that he had not heard the blow fall.

If it had been anybody but John she would have been much more embarra.s.sed than she was, but by now she had come unconsciously to feel that when things went wrong John was the natural person to come to. He could always help her through them.

"Grandmother told me--" she began, then stopped. It was pretty hard to tell, after all.

"Go on," he told her encouragingly. "Grandmother told you what?"

"She told me that she wrote your mother, and your mother said--she said she wished we'd told her; but, anyway, she's sent out invitations for a big party--to meet _me_!"

It all came with a rush. She didn't dare to meet John's eyes after she had said it.

She heard his long, low whistle of astonishment, scarcely suppressed in time, and a lower, but quite as fervent, "Great Scott!" and then silence. It was not for a full minute that she dared look in the direction of his chair, which he had swung away when she had told him. She gave one quick glance, then another longer one. She could not see his face, but his shoulders were shaking.... Had it moved him so?

Joy was used, at Grandfather's, to hear of people being "moved."

"I didn't think John was the kind of a man to have emotions outside of him that way," she thought a little disappointedly, "but I suppose an awful thing like this--"

About then he turned himself toward her. He was laughing!

"Do you think it's funny?" she demanded.

"Funny?" replied John Hewitt, still laughing desperately, and trying quite as desperately to do it quietly enough to prevent the descent of the others, wanting to know what he was laughing at. "I think it's one of the funniest things that ever happened. Talk about Nemesis--if ever a punishment fitted the crime, this does!"

Joy sighed relievedly. At least, he wasn't being angry about it, and he might very well have been. She glanced out the window, which, like the windows of most New England cars in summer, had evidently been closed ever since John Hanc.o.c.k died, and glued in place. Then suddenly the thing struck her as funny, too. They were in for it, and by their own act. She began to laugh with him, quite forgetting that she had more explanations before her, and as a really honorable girl had no alternative but going back to Grandmother with her sins on her head.

"Oh, it _is_ ridiculous," she gasped. "I feel as if I'd kidnapped you and couldn't dispose of you.... We really must stop laughing, or the others will come down on us to know what we're laughing at."

"You won't be able to dispose of me till the visit's over, at any rate," John answered her, sobering a little. "My mother and your grandmother have settled that for us effectually."

Joy sat bolt upright and faced him.

"You mean you're going to let it go on?"

"Why, of course I'm going to let it go on," said he matter-of-factly. "What else can we do about it?"

Joy's heart gave a spring of happiness. She wouldn't miss her visit, after all!

"We can find out that we don't like each other, and break off the day you go home. I'll come back from the train very sad," he told her.

"Thank you _very_ much," she said happily. "I thought I was going to have to confess to every one and go back to Grandmother.

I'm very glad I needn't."

"You poor kiddie!" he said, as he had said the first time he met her. "Well, on this particular point all you have to do is remember what Beatrice Fairfax says, 'Never explain and never confess, and you'll be respected and admired by all.'"

"It sounds like getting admiration and respect under false pretenses," Joy answered doubtfully. But she dimpled as she said it and looked up sideways at John under her black eyelashes.

The effect was so unexpected and pretty that it set John wondering why she didn't do it oftener. Suddenly a probable reason dawned on him. When John Hewitt discovered anything wrong it was his prompt habit to right it, and he did so now.

"See here, child, I can't have you being afraid of me," he said peremptorily. "When I told you I was a trial fiance, I didn't mean that I was to be less of a fiance than a trial. If we're going to be theoretically engaged for a month, we'll have to be friends, at least, and friends trust each other, and know they can ask each other to do anything they want. They know, too, that they never need be afraid of either being angry at the other."

"Then I'm to take it for granted that you feel as friendly toward me as I do toward you?" she asked.

"Why, naturally," he answered. "That's friends.h.i.+p."

"It sounds much nicer than anything I ever heard about in my life,"

said Joy enthusiastically. "But--are you sure I'm not the one that's going to be more of a trial than a fiance? I--I don't want to be a bother, you know."

"If you are, I'll tell you," he promised.

"All right," said Joy contentedly, "and I promise not to have my feelings hurt a bit."

She felt quite unafraid of him by now, as he had intended, for they had been talking together as if they were exactly the same age--or, rather, Joy thought, as if n.o.body had any age at all.

"Do you know," she told him confidentially, "I _did_ want a lover, back there at home. A real one, I mean. I saw a girl with one, and you could tell there wasn't anything on earth so nice as being lovers. But this is lots better--all the nice part of it and none of the stupid part--for I suppose they were going to be married."

John looked at her curiously.

"Joy, did you never have a friend of your own age, or any companions but those old people of yours?"

She shook her head, smiling.

"Never any."

"That accounts for you, I suppose," said he with a sigh, which puzzled Joy very much. She had accepted as gospel John's order not to be afraid of him; and she was talking to him as if he were confidant, father and sister, all in one. That it might be treatment a very attractive man wasn't used to never dawned on her, because she had nothing to check up by.

"Do I need accounting for?" she inquired, with another of the sidelong smiling glances he approved of.

She really wanted to know, but she was so contented with life as it was then that she did not feel particularly distressed over it. Her trial lover took another look at her and decided that perhaps she didn't need to be accounted for, after all. She was wearing the little golden-brown suit she clung to, with its little cap to match, and her cheeks were flushed with the heat of that September day. It was as interesting to watch her develop one and another little way, he decided, as it would have been to observe an intelligent child.

That there was some slight difference in his mind between her and a bona fide intelligent child was proved by that fact that he would just as lief that Philip had not interrupted them just then: though the interruption was done with all Philip's natural grace.