The Wishing-Ring Man | Page 7

and hid at the foot of the back stairs, with Aunt Lucilla for a companion.
"I hope I shall behave if somebody finds me, and tells me what a privilege it is to be me," said Joy; "but I doubt it. Because it isn't. It isn't one bit."
"What isn't?" demanded a man's voice interestedly.
CHAPTER TWO
BY GRACE OF THE WISHING RING
Joy turned her head to look. She was quite sure that the speaker couldn't see her very well, but she could see him, or the top of him, perfectly, because he was standing in the crack of a door that gave on to the back hall; a door few people remembered existed, as a picture hung on it, and it gave no impression of ever being used. He was young and broad-shouldered and sure-looking, little as she could see of him. She could see his face as far down as the eyes, and that was all. They were pleasant, steel-colored eyes, very amused and direct, and his hair, in the light of the old-fashioned chandelier behind him, glittered, fair and a little curlier than he evidently approved of.
He slipped entirely through the door; at the same moment Joy blew out the candle she had been holding up to Aunt Lucilla. Then she laughed, a little shy, pretty laugh. She wished she could light it again, to look at him, but she remembered that if she did that he might think she did want to look at him.
"I'm so glad you've come!" she almost said. He seemed like some one she had been waiting for a long while, some way, instead of the usual stranger you had to get used to. There was such a breath of freshness and courage and cheer in just the few words he had spoken and the little laugh they were borne on, that Joy felt irrationally what a nice world it was. Then she remembered to reply to what he had said.
"It isn't a privilege, being me," she explained from her shadows.
He looked over to where her voice came from, but there wasn't anything visible except a little dark heap on the last three stairs.
"I could tell better if I could see you," he stated pleasantly. "Don't you want to take the hint?"
But Joy, mindful of the hanging braids that would certainly make him think she was a little girl, would not take it at all. She snuggled against the wall.
"Oh, you can see me any time," she said carelessly, "but you can scarcely ever get to talk to me. At least, I heard somebody say so last month."
She felt quite like somebody else, a gay, teasing, careless sort of real girl, talking to him here in the dark. She was sure she wouldn't if the lights were on. She could talk to him as if he were some one out of a book or a story, so long as he didn't know she looked like a book-person or a play-person herself.
"Well, anyway, do let me stay here," he begged, doing it. "For the last hour I haven't felt as if it was much of a privilege to be me, either. Do you know that feeling of terrible personal unworthiness you get at a party where everybody knows everybody else and nobody knows you? I feel like precisely the kind of long, wiggly worm the little boy ate."
Joy felt very sorry for him; because if she didn't know that feeling she knew one to match it; having everybody know her and nobody think of playing with her.... This man was playing with her for a minute, anyway.
"And I'll always have him to remember," she thought happily, "even when I'm an old, old lady, writing reminiscences of Grandfather, the way they all say I should ..." She went off into a little daydream of writing all this down in her reminiscences, and having him--old, too, then--write back to her and say that he, also, had always remembered the time happily, and wondered who she was.... Then she answered him.
"You know me, anyway--don't say you know no one," she told him. "Anyway, I'm glad you're talking to me. I'm Joy."
He laughed again, leaning against the door-frame in the thread of light.
"Then you're something I've been looking for a long time," he said. "I've had friends and success, and good times--but I've never found Joy till now."
She knew, of course, that he was just being pleasant about her name, as people were sometimes. But it sounded very lovely to remember.
"I'm Alton Havenith's granddaughter," she explained sedately. And, with a sudden desire that he should know the worst, she added, "I'm the one he writes poetry to."
He must have caught a note of regret in her voice--oh, he was a very wonderful person! for what he said wasn't a bit what