The Wishing-Ring Man Part 20

"A 'hard world for gentlemen'!" meditated Joy, and laughed as she trailed one hand in the water. "It's a much harder one for ladies, if Allan but knew it!"

She bent over, half-absently, to watch the water in the basin. It fascinated her, the flow of it, and it helped her to reason things out. There were several things that needed reasoning.

To begin with--there was no use saying it wasn't so, for it was--she was in love with John.... Her heart beat hard as she looked down into the water and said the words in her mind. It would have been lovely to do nothing but sit there and think of him. There were so many different wonderful things he had for her to think about; his steady eyes that changed from warm-gray to steel-gray, and back, and could look as if they loved you or hated you or admired you or fathered you, while the rest of his face told nothing at all; the little gold glint in his fair hair and the way it curled when it was damp weather; his square, back-flung shoulders; the strong way he had of moving you about, as if you were a doll--the way his voice sounded when she said certain words--

Joy pulled her thoughts from all that by force.

"Clarence Rutherford calls me a sorcerette," she thought, "and I suppose I must be. This must be being one. But, oh, I _have_ to think how I can get John to love me back!"

It looked a little hopeless, to think of, at first. He was so old and wise and strong, compared to her, just a nineteen-year-old girl who had never had even one lover to practise on! Something Gail had said the night before came back to her--one of the girl's half-scornful, half-amused phrases.

"Barring a male flirt or so like Clarence over there," she had vouchsafed, "men _are_ such simple-minded children of nature!

All you have to do is to treat them like hounds and tell them what to do, and they'll do it."

Joy could scarcely imagine treating John like a hound. She was too afraid of him, except once in a while when she had a burst of daring. But, at any rate, if she went on the principle that John was simple-minded and could always be depended on to think she felt the way she acted, things would be lots easier.

"If only I can keep the courage!" she prayed.

But as to details. She would have to let John see enough of her to want her about. But--not so much that he got tired of it.

"I wonder how much of me would tire him?" she said. Anyway--Joy dimpled as she thought of it--he seemed to want to be the only one.

He didn't seem to want Clarence around. They all kept telling her Clarence was a flirt--as if she wanted him to be anything else! It's a comfort sometimes to know that a man can be depended on not to have intentions.... Very well, she would try to make John jealous of Clarence. Not enough to hurt him--it would be dreadful to hurt him!--but enough to make herself valuable.

"It's going to be very hard," she decided, "because all I want is to do just as he says and make everything as happy for him as I can.

Oh, dear, why are men like that!"

But she was fairly certain that they were. They were like that in the books, and Gail had said so. Gail apparently knew.

"It'll be hard," she thought sadly. Then her face brightened. "But it'll be fun! and if it works I'll be able to be as nice to John as I want to all the rest of my life, and please him to my heart's content. Why, it'll be my duty!"

She smiled and fell into another dream about John, leaning over the fountain, with her copper braids falling across her bosom.

She had forgotten all the outside things, until presently she felt some one standing near her.

"_Lean down to the water, Melisande, Melisande!_"

the some one sang, in a soft, half-mocking voice.

She turned and looked up.

"How do you do, Mr. Rutherford?" she said sedately.

She had been addressed as "Melisande" too many times, at home with the poets, to be particularly excited, but even a man of Clarence's well-known capabilities couldn't be expected to know this. He disposed himself gracefully along the edge of the fountain. He had a feline and leisurely grace, in spite of the fact that he wasn't specially thin, had Clarence, as he very well knew.

"I hope I won't fall into the water," he observed disarmingly. "I may if you speak to me too severely. See here, Melisande, why did you go and be all engaged to the worthy Dr. Hewitt? You had four or five good years of fun ahead of you if you hadn't."

"I mustn't listen to you, if you talk that way," Joy told him quietly.

"Oh, you'd better," said Clarence with placidity. "I'm very interesting."

"You're very vain," Joy told him, laughing at him in spite of herself.

"I am, indeed--it's one of my charms," explained he. "Now that's out of the way, we'll go on talking."

"Well, go on talking!" Joy answered him childishly, putting her hands over her ears. "I can go on not listening!"

Clarence accordingly did, while Joy kept her hands over her ears till her arms were tired and Clarence apparently had no more to say.

Then she dropped them.

"I was reciting the Westminster catechism," Clarence observed blandly.

"I never waste my gems of conversation on deaf ears. Come, Joy of my life, unbend a little. I don't mean a bit of harm in the world. All I want is a kind word or two and the pleasure of your society."

Joy looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, and then laughed.

"If you were a poet, here is where you would tell me that the fetters of wearying and sordid marriage were not for you--that they wore on your genius," she said unexpectedly.

Clarence gasped. It must have been very much like having the kitten suddenly turn and offer him rational conversation.

"_Et tu_, Laet.i.tia!" he said in a neat and scholarly manner.

"Joy, you have cruelly deceived me--I thought you were a simple child of nature."

"I don't know a bit what I am," she answered truthfully, "but the poets at Grandfather's did talk that way--not to me, but to other people--and you sounded like them. You aren't really a poet, are you?"

"Well, I've never been overt about it," he evaded. He did not know what to make of Joy, any more than ever.

Joy, trailing the end of a braid absently in the water, thought a minute longer, then looked up at him.

"It seems to me," she said suddenly, "that you just mock and mock at things all the time. I'm not clever, and I can't answer you cleverly. You might as well make up your mind to it, and then the way I look won't be a disappointment to you. I know I look like a medieval princess. It's because I was brought up to. But I'm not the least bit medieval inside; honestly I'm not. I love to cook and I love children, and I'm always hungry for my meals. I don't want to seem discouraging, but I shall really be a dreadful disappointment to you if you--"

"As long as you have copper-gold hair and sky-blue eyes, _nothing_ you can do will disappoint me," said Clarence caressingly. "Be a suffragette, if you will--be a war-widow! It's all the same. I can be just as happy with you--and I intend to be!"

The mockery dropped from his voice for a moment as he said the last words. Joy looked at him, a little frightened for the moment. She smiled, then.... She was only nineteen, but she was thoroughly human, and the spirit of Aunt Lucilla lighted her eyes. She dropped her black lashes against her pink cheeks and spoke irresponsibly.

"But suppose--suppose I should fall in love with you?" she asked in a most little-girl voice. "Don't you see how dreadfully unhappy _I_ would be?"

"Oh, you won't," Clarence a.s.sured her in a tone whose casualness did not quite hide his welcome of the prospect. "We'll just be interested in each other enough to make it interesting. Why, Joy of My Life, I wouldn't take anything from good old Hewitt for anything in the world."

There was a certain amount of conceit in Clarence's voice and manner, patent even to so inexperienced a person as Joy. He seemed to think that all he had to do was take! Joy looked at him curiously for a moment, and then she sighed. Sometimes she almost wished somebody _would_ take her mind off caring so much for John.

"But this isn't real," she suddenly thought, "the suns.h.i.+ne and the gaiety and these kind, handsome Harrington people being good to me, and this Clarence person posing about and trying to toy with my young affections--why, it's like a fairy tale or a play! ... I just rubbed the wis.h.i.+ng ring, and it happened!"

She forgot Clarence again and began to sing softly under her breath, watching the ruffled water.

"What are you thinking, Melisande?" asked Clarence softly.

Joy lifted her wide innocent eyes and gave him a discreet version.

"That, after all, this is a glade in Fairyland, and I am the princess, and you--the dragon," she ended under her breath.