The Wishing-Ring Man Part 41

He sat down on the step below her.

"But Gail didn't know anything! Gail never will know anything.

n.o.body 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 circ.u.mstances?"

"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 fiancee, 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