The Wishing-Ring Man Part 14

"Oh, you found her," he remarked. "I thought she wouldn't have been out of the house."

"Where was she?" demanded Philip, John, and Joy in a polite chorus, surrounding the center of attraction, who slept on.

"Under the guest-room bed," said Phyllis, putting her daughter down on a couch as she spoke, and going over to the table, where she struck the bell for soup, and sat down.

"I crawled under," interjected Mrs. Hewitt proudly, looking every inch a d.u.c.h.ess as she said it, "and there she was! She had eaten every bit of cheese from the set mousetrap under it; I forgot to tell you, Phyllis."

"Good gracious!" said Phyllis as the rest sat down about the table.... "Well, if it hasn't hurt her so far, it mayn't at all. I'm not going to wake her out of a seraphic slumber like that just to ask her if she has a pain."

"You don't let _me_ eat cheese at night," said Philip aggrievedly here, looking up from his plate. "And I knew that mousetrap was there, and I never touched a sc.r.a.p of it. It was set the day we went away from the chickenpox."

"You're a very high-minded child," said his father soothingly.

"And there's charlotte russe for your dessert, Master Philip,"

whispered the waitress: at which Philip forgot his wrongs and brightened visibly.

The meal went on rather silently after this, because everybody was rather hungry. Philip grew drowsier and drowsier, till Viola stole in and led him away, "walking asleep." The grown people went on talking and laughing around the table.

"With n.o.body to hush them so he could make a literary criticism,"

Joy thought happily.

Mrs. Hewitt tore herself away with obvious reluctance, about ten or so, taking John with her. After that Phyllis said that she was sleepy, but not to let that make anybody else feel they had to be sleepy, too. Joy had been holding her eyelids up by main force for some time, because she hadn't wanted to miss any of the talk and laughter and delightful feeling of being grown up and in the midst of things. So she went up to bed, almost as drowsily as Philip had before her.

Just as she was on the point of dropping off to sleep, with the wind blowing, flower-scented, across her face, she remembered something that made her sit bolt upright in bed and think. There was going to be a grand affair for her at Mrs. Hewitt's house the very next night, and she hadn't a blessed thing to wear! Nothing, that is, but five art-frocks which she had determined in her heart never to wear again. But--the wind among the trees was very soothing, and the wishing ring lay loose and heavy on her finger.

"You'll look after it," Joy murmured drowsily to the ring, and went to sleep.

Philip wakened her the next morning. He was very clean and rosy from a recent bath, and he was curled on the quilt at her feet, staring intently at her.

"Did you know if you look hard at asleep folks' eyes they open?" he inquired affably. "You see they do. Yours did. Do you mind dogs on your bed, or Angela?"

Philip was always so perfectly friendly that Joy was very much at ease with him, which had never been her case before with children.

But, then, she had never met any intimately before. She reached out a slim white arm from beneath the covers and pulled him down and kissed him--an operation which he bore with his usual politeness.

"I love dogs, and Angela," she told him. "And I don't mind them on the bed a bit, if your mother doesn't."

Philip a.s.sumed a convenient deafness as to the last clause, and whistled, whereat his slaves, Ivan, the white wolfhound, Foxy, and Angela, all appeared joyously and dashed across the floor, scrambling enthusiastically up on the white counterpane. They were almost too many for one three-quarters bed, and Joy, on whom most of the happy family was sitting, could have wished the dogs a little lighter, even while she gave Angela a hand up. Angela scrambled up with intense earnestness and loud little pantings, and, finally seated on a pillow in triumph, smiled broadly and charmingly, her golden head c.o.c.ked to one side.

"Doggies went garden, 'is morning," she informed Joy, still smiling enchantingly. "Oo--a _big_ hole!"

"She means they dug a hole," Philip translated. "You can't always tell when she's making up things that aren't so; but this is. It's there now, with worms in it, and a rosebush that fell in. But I washed all their paws in the bathtub," he added hastily, "and Angela's frock-front. Didn't I, Angel?"

"Fock-front!" said Angela, beaming and spatting herself happily in the region named.

Joy cast a wild look around her. Foxy lay across her at her waist line--yes, there were paw-marks all over the counterpane, and Ivan, who seemed to have had more than his share of the cleansing, showed a distinct arc of wetness where his long body had lain at the foot of the bed.

Philip, following her eyes, slid un.o.btrusively from her side.

"I--I just thought you'd like to see the dogs, and the baby," he explained. "Most people do. Mother sent me to tell you it was nine o'clock, and would you like to get up?"

He made no further references to paws or washings. He merely whistled again to Angela and the dogs, who were reluctant, but struggled obediently down from the counterpane, leaving, alas, distinct traces in all directions.

"If you frow the covers back n.o.body'll see anything," he hinted from the doorway, and was gone.

Joy did not take his hint. Instead, she pulled the counterpane off bodily and put it in the window to sun, and then went on dressing.

Things were so cheerful and sunny and funny in this house.

"Oh, John was right," she thought buoyantly, as she braided her ropes of hair. "Things do come right if you hope and wish and _know_ they will!"

The glitter of the ring caught her eyes, in the mirror, between the bronze ripples of hair, and it reminded her of one thing that was _not_ settled: her frock for the evening, this wonderful evening when a party was going to be given for just her!

She asked Phyllis about it as soon as breakfast--a somewhat riotous meal--was over. She was a little diffident, because she was sure that any sane grown-up person who was told that there were five good frocks you hated would tell you you should wear them. But Phyllis only suggested bringing them down and looking them over. So they did.

"They all have queer things all over them that n.o.body else wears except ill.u.s.trations in historical novels, and they're all of very good materials," said Joy sadly, laying them out one by one. "And there isn't one I don't hate to wear. But I never could explain that to Grandmother, of course."

She looked at Phyllis with a wistful hope in her eyes. Phyllis thoughtfully lifted the yellow satin skirts of Joy's pet detestation.

"This is a lovely material," she said thoughtfully. "Is it the color you don't like?"

"N-no," Joy answered doubtfully. "It's the make." Then she burst out pa.s.sionately. "I want to look frisky!" she declared. "I want to be dressed the way John's used to seeing girls. I--I want to look just as pretty and like folks as Gail Maddox!"

She checked herself, flushing and biting her lip. She hadn't meant to say that!

But Phyllis took it beautifully.

"No reason why you shouldn't look just exactly like folks," she soothed. "This is lovely, too, this silver tissue. Goodness, what a lot of material there is in these angel sleeves!"... She held it up consideringly... "Wait a minute, Joy, I think I read my t.i.tle clear." She ran out of the room, coming back in a moment with a life-size dress-form in her arms, which she set down.

"Here's Dora, the dress-model," she said cheerfully. "She adjusts."

In proof she began to screw Dora down and in to required proportions, measuring her by Joy, who watched operations with fascinated eyes.

"I never knew you could sew," she said.

"My father was a country minister," Mrs. Harrington explained, flinging the green frock, inside out, over the steely shoulders of Dora, the dress-frame. "I cook very nicely, if I do say it myself, and till I was seventeen I did every bit of my own sewing."

"And were you married at seventeen?"

"No," Phyllis answered, stopping a moment from her pinnings and speaking more gravely. "My father died then, and I went to work. I hadn't time to sew after that--I bought ready-made things. So when I _was_ married--that was a long seven years afterwards--I did have such lovely times buying organdies and laces and things and cutting them out and making them! That was the summer Allan was getting well."

She stared off at the wall for a moment, as she knelt up against the green satin. "That was the loveliest summer I ever had--excepting every one since."

She laughed a little, then prevented herself from further speech by putting a frieze of pins in her mouth and beginning to do something with the dress with them, one by one.

"Do you mind cutting into this?" she asked when that row was gone.

"The more the better!" said Joy with enthusiasm.

"It will make a stunning frock, with the silver net draped over the pale-green satin... M'm. That silver iridescent girdle on the other dress--the violet--can I have that, too?"