The Wishing-Ring Man Part 31

Joy had a faint feeling that Phyllis Harrington ought to have the part with her own name, but Clarence explained that names had nothing whatever to do with it unless you were a movie star, when you used your first name in order to make the public more interested in your personality.

"We will give Gail the part you don't want," he told her, "as a punishment for not letting you cook your eight-course dinner tonight. By the way, we must time ourselves to get back and eat it.

I wonder whether Gail can cook. On second thoughts, why not stay out till it's over?"

"The play!" said Joy imperatively.

"Well," he said, yielding, "would you rather be a fairy princess or a shepherdess from Arcady? I'd prefer to have you the shepherdess, for personal reasons. I wish to be the shepherd."

"Whatever you say," said Joy absently. "It's getting colder. Hadn't we better walk a little?"

"Very well," said Clarence. "We can argue as we walk."

The problem of making sixteen young women willing to be a chorus and of finding sixteen or twenty young men to be anything, took them quite a while to discuss. They walked on as they talked, until it began to get darker.

"By the way, have you any idea where we are?" inquired Clarence, stopping short to look about him. "New England woods are not my native habitat."

"Nor mine," said Joy, startled. "I think we ought to go back to the high road."

"If there's any left to go back to," suggested Clarence. "We've been on one way-path after another so long that I don't think I could find it again."

They turned around, and continued to follow way-paths back. Clarence had no pocket compa.s.s, such as people who get lost ought to possess.

And it was getting relentlessly darker and darker. Joy had never been lost before, and she was surprised to find the feeling of panic that possessed her when she grasped the fact that neither of them knew where they were. Finally they gained a clear s.p.a.ce where there was a tolerably traveled-looking road.

"If we wait here somebody may come along," said Clarence. "Jove, I'm hungry!"

"So am I," said Joy.

But there wasn't anything to do about _that_. Finally Joy remembered that she had some chocolate in her little handbag, and they divided it and ate it. After that life was a little brighter.

"Do you suppose we'll have to stay here all night?" demanded Joy.

"We'll freeze to death if we do."

"No, I don't," said Clarence. "But, Joy dear, if we do----"

The mockery was all out of his voice.

"Oh, don't talk about it!" she exclaimed. "Surely somebody will come get us--or couldn't we go up this road till we find a farmhouse?"

"If you like," said Clarence.

They rose and walked on for a while.

"Oh, listen!" Joy whispered. "I hear something!"

"It's a car," said Clarence hopefully.

And it was. It was John's car, with John in it, and the temper Joy had been thinking of tenderly was with him. He was evidently thoroughly angry, for he scarcely spoke, even when he found them.

"See here, Hewitt," Clarence protested. "You aren't doing the thing at all properly. You should say, 'My own! At last I have found you!'

instead of backing up the car with a short sentence like that."

What John had said, as a matter of fact, was, "Get in the car. It's late."

He did come to a little at Clarence's flippant reminder, and smiled reluctantly.

"Well, you see, it was self-evident. I _had_ found you both. You oughtn't to have walked so far if you didn't know where you were going."

"It is also self-evident that it is late," said Clarence stiffly, and, it must be confessed, a little sulkily. "Nevertheless, we're having a very pleasant time.... Is dinner over?"

John, for no apparent reason, smiled frankly at this. "Not in the least," he said. "They are waiting dinner till the prodigals'

return. My mother has had hers sent up to her, but Gail and your friend Tiddy are kindly keeping the rest of it hot."

It is a quicker journey in a car than when you stroll leisurely along, discussing light opera and your disposition. They were surprised to find how near, comparatively, they were, to the village.

"Joy, do you suppose I am invited to dinner?" asked Clarence in a stage whisper. "If it is not thus I shall probably starve by the roadside, because Gail sent her mother to a bridge-and-high-tea before she went, and the maids there had no orders about food.

That's why I was prowling about the hospitable Hewitt mansion."

Joy couldn't help smiling. "I think you must be," she said.

But she didn't understand John's allusion to Tiddy. He was abjectly devoted to Gail, but it did seem that devotion had its limits, when it came to following her to somebody else's house.

"What is Tiddy doing in these parts?" Clarence asked for her, as people so often do ask your questions for you if you only give them time. "Dinner-party, is it?"

"Tiddy," said John dryly, "is making himself useful."

"That is nothing at all new in Tiddy's life," said Gail's cousin.

"People who dwell about Gail do. Am I to understand that he is chief cook and bottle-washer?"

"You are," said John.

They got out and went into the house, Joy feeling as mussy as only a girl can who has been away from home all day. She followed the curious-minded Clarence into the kitchen.

The sight that met their eyes was an interesting one. The kitchen was a pleasant sight to any one from outside, being warmed and lighted. It was further decorated by Gail, in a very low and clinging black frock trimmed with poppies, which it occurred to Joy must have been in the grip. She was sitting in absolute idleness in a kitchen chair, with her feet on a footstool, and Tiddy, swathed in an ap.r.o.n with pink checks, was engaged at the kitchen range.

"Good work, old boy!" Clarence called out to him. "What have you got?"

Tiddy turned a scarlet face toward him, and waved one hand, with a spoon in it.

"Gail said there had to be a good dinner," he said worriedly, "but I don't know how to make many things. This is soup.... It doesn't look right to me, somehow. Come here, Clarence, and give it a once over."

Joy, leaning against the lintel with John a little behind her as usual, couldn't help but admire Gail. She knew perfectly well that it would never have occurred to her in Gail's place to sit placidly in a chair while a lad who ought to have been at home studying-Tiddy was cramming to catch up with his cla.s.s at college--wrestled with the stove. But, after all, that was the sort of thing she had always read of sirens doing. And even if the victim was only a little college boy, of what Clarence called frying size, it was a sight to make one wishful. Also apprehensive--mightn't Gail set John peeling potatoes next? That sight would be an annoying one from various angles.

John showed no signs of being about to yield, at least at the moment. He joined Clarence in teasing Tiddy, who took it very sweetly, but he finally came forward and showed the lad how to manage the drafts.

"Call us when you're ready, Cookie," said Clarence amiably, and sauntered out. John followed him.

"Can't I help?" asked Joy, staying conscientiously behind. She still felt that it was her responsibility.

"Not a bit," said Gail. "We're getting along wonderfully. You'd better go up and get straightened out, though--you look blown to bits. Oh, and send John back as you go through, Tiddy can't do the drafts right."