that night, not to speak of a most exciting evening before it. She
really thought in her heart that she couldn't sleep, but she laid
her head back against the hot red velvet of the seat, and actually
did sleep dangerously near the time to change cars. She got a
chair-car after that, but, having got into the way of it, drowsed
again. She woke up from a dream that John was coming down the aisle,
only Gail was somewhere outside with a rope around his arms, and was
going to pull him back in a minute, to find that she was at the
journey's end. She had only her suitcase to gather up. She had not
even asked Phyllis to send her trunk. Well, Phyllis would, anyway.
The old house was just the same. She thought irrepressibly, as she
came slowly up the steps, about the little boy who ran away from
home, and when he came back after four hours, fidgeted a while, and
then said off-handedly, "Well, I see you have the same old cat!" She
knew exactly how that small boy had felt.
"The same old cats!" she said half-aloud as three plump,
velvet-upholstered ladies ambled down the steps, and passed her
without knowing her. Then she checked her mind in its careering. "I
mustn't get Gailish, even if I am unhappy," she reminded herself.
"That's the sort of thing she'd say."
Old Elizabeth was in the hall, in attendance, as usual. Joy flung her
arms round her impulsively and kissed her. It was good to see her again,
and to know that she didn't know any terrible things about her having
commandeered a lover that really belonged to somebody else.
"Oh, Miss Joy, Miss Joy dear!" said old Elizabeth. "How good you got
here in time for the reception! And it's good to see you, too. Run
up and git into some pretty clothes like your grandpa likes, and go
right into the parlor."
Joy smiled a little as she obeyed old Elizabeth. It seemed queer,
and yet natural, to come back and slip into her old place as a minor
figure in the old unbreakable routine. She had been a real person
with a major part to play, all these weeks at Wallraven.... But it
was rather a comfort, now, to feel that it didn't matter to anybody
what you did, as long as Grandfather was pleased. And she felt as if
she was willing to be a whole row of parlor bric-a-brac, she was so
meek and so tired and unhappy.
It was the amber satin she had rebelled so against that she took out
of her suitcase deliberately and put on. It was tight across the
chest, and actually a little short for her--she had _grown_,
really grown in the active open-air weeks she had been away. She was
tanned, too, she found when the yellow dress was on, and there was a
freckle on the back of one little white hand. She braided her hair
in the old way and went down to the long parlors, back to the
autographed pictures and framed letters, and Grandfather,
benignantly great at the end of the room.
Grandmother was very glad to see her. They snatched a minute in a
dark corner before they had to go on seeing guests. Joy found
herself going up and down the room saying courteous things to people
in just the old way. They were not surprised to see her. Perhaps
they had scarcely noticed that she had been away.
"It's the same old cat--I've only been away three hours," she
reminded herself with a little rueful smile. Then she saw a
shy-looking couple over in the corner, and went over, to try to put
them at ease.... She wouldn't have thought about people being shy or
needing putting at ease before she went away!...
"Something _has_ happened to me," thought Joy. Then she thought
what it was. Why, she was doing the way John would have done--thinking
about other people's feelings, not her own, for one minute. It felt
warm in her heart. She had that for a keepsake from John, anyway.
But she found she was making a mistake to think about John. After a
half-hour of moving about the long parlors she fled. The little dark
place in the back hall was just the same. Six weeks, naturally, had
not altered it.
She sat down on the bottom step in a little heap, with her face in
her hands, under Aunt Lucilla's triumphant picture. She remembered
it above her, but she did not want to look at it.
"I wish you hadn't egged me on, Aunt Lucilla," she said most
unfairly from between her hands.
She did not know how long she had sat there, when she heard a little
squeak, and looked up with her heart jumping. It sounded like the
squeak doors make that haven't been opened for--say--six weeks or
two months....
There in the ray of light from the chandelier in the room behind,
the light glinting on his fair curly hair, he stood as he had stood
before, the wishing-ring man.
For a moment Joy thought she was seeing something that wasn't so.
Then she looked down. The ring was on her finger still, not on his.
And he was not a vision. He was a human man, a man she knew and
loved. And he did not smile at her this time, as the vision would
have done, in a quizzical, stranger-friendly fashion, and stand
still. He was over at her side in one swift step, and he had both
her hands tight, as if they belonged to him, and he was talking to
her in a loving, scolding voice, as people only talk to you when you
belong to them and they to you.
"Joy! You very naughty little girl, to run away this way!"
For a minute she only wanted to cling to his hands and tell him how
glad--how glad she was to see him, and how nothing else in the whole
beautiful world mattered at all. But she remembered she mustn't.
"You told Gail. You might have known she'd shame me before everybody
if she could. She doesn't care.... Oh, John, how could you?"
She held on to him hard for comfort even while she was reproaching him.
He looked down at her in the half-light, then, as if he was fairly
content with what he saw in her face, closed the door behind him.
They could still see each other enough to talk.
"Next time give me a little more benefit of the doubt, my dear. _I
never told Gail anything_!"
When John told you anything it was so. That was all there was to
_that_. She gave a gasp of blessed relief.
"But--" she protested. "But Gail knew----"
He sat down on the step below her.
"But Gail didn't know anything! Gail never will know anything.
Nobody ever will but you and I and Phyllis Harrington, who is much
safer than a church. But it did take a certain amount of diplomacy
to extract from Gail exactly what she said to you that frightened
you into another state--or rather what she meant by it."
He was smiling now. Could it possibly be----
"I went to Gail as soon as Phyllis had called me up and had had it
out with me--which, I may add, she did rather severely," he went on
calmly, though he still held one hand as if he was afraid Joy would
vanish again. "And Gail said----"
He stopped provokingly, and Joy held her breath.
"Well, I won't torment you, though I am inclined to think you
deserve it. It appears that Gail had learned from that friend of
hers, Laura Ward, to whom she had spoken of you and your people,
that you posed as a model for a couple of artists, just before you
left this city, in order to earn money for gowns. The girl lived in
the same studio building with them ... their name was Morrow, I
think. She was under the impression that you were a professional
model till the Morrows explained, and you had struck her as such a
very good type that she remembered you and the whole episode. Gail
was teasing you about it, as she teases every one. She has a
provocative, half-mocking manner that she lets go too far sometimes.
I'm not inclined to forgive her for tormenting my little girl."
Joy gave a long sigh of relief.
"Then--you're not engaged to Gail?"
He gave the hands he held a little half-impatient, half-loving shake.
"Would I have asked you to marry me under those circumstances?"
"You never asked me to marry you," said Joy in a subdued voice. She
felt as if the world were coming down around her ears. "I was a
trial fiancée, and a good deal of a trial at that, as you said.
And--you only did it to oblige me, and--and I'm very much obliged
and--and hadn't you better go?"
If he stayed much longer----
His voice, that had been light, became more tender and more serious.
"Joy, do you think I could see much of you without caring for you?
When I first met you I took you for a child, and there was so much
of the child about you afterwards that, when I yielded to an impulse
and helped you out of your dilemma I scarcely knew I was in love
with you. But it didn't take me long after that to find it out. And
my only fear was that you were going through it all in the same
childlike spirit, that you couldn't care for me. But when I asked
you if you belonged to me, and you said--do you remember? You always
were human--for me'--why--" his voice became happier again, for she
had not drawn away, "why, I thought I was asking you to marry me.
And I thought you were saying you would. But if you weren't....
_Don't_ you care, Joy? _Aren't_ you mine? It doesn't seem as if
you could be any one else's."
His voice broke.
She bent down, where she sat above him. Her voice was very happy and
very tender.
"But I always was, John. Always, from the first minute you opened
the door there, and looked at me, and spoke. I--I expect I always
shall be."
Neither of them spoke for a while after that. Presently John held
her off and looked at her, and laughed a little.
"Well, what?" demanded Joy peacefully. She didn't much care what,
but she wanted to know. "And Elizabeth sometimes brushes under these
stairs when receptions are over. She may find us."
"I shall be delighted to meet Elizabeth," said John with his usual
calm. "But it merely occurred to me that it wasn't so much that you
belonged to me as that I belonged to you. I'm not sure that you're
entirely a human being yet. And I don't think I shall trust you any
longer with that wishing ring."
She slipped it off very seriously and gave it to him.
"I would only wish that you should have everything you wanted," she
said. "I did, you know."
He slid it back on the finger it was so much too large for. "I'll
get you an honest-to-goodness one, too," he said. "But you'd better
keep it. I _have_ everything I wanted."
He drew her head down and kissed her in demonstration of the fact.
"But I do think it was the ring that did it," said little Joy.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Wishing-Ring Man, by Margaret Widdemer