Joy and Tiddy accordingly burst into song, assisted by Allan and John. Mrs. Hewitt, who had to be very stealthy about coming in, because she had been put out several times for talking in the middle of some exciting moment, slid into a chair beside the De Guenthers, and behaved nobly. She was quite able to be around now, and Joy was beginning to feel that she ought to accede to Phyllis' requests to go back and stay with them a while. The children demanded her daily. "I do hope the gate receipts will be more than the expenses," Clarence said hopefully in a resting-space. "The last time I got up anything like this we cleared just two dollars. We'd formally dedicated it to a Home for the Aged, in the blessed hope that the directresses would sell tickets enough to fill the hall. But they didn't. They took our two dollars away from us just the same. I always begrudged them that two-spot." "If you have the girls' school in it that can't happen," Gail reminded him. "They're little demons at ticket-selling." So next day Phyllis took Joy with her, and also the De Guenthers as an evidence of deep respectability, and they drove over to the school, and actually secured the co-operation of the girls and their teachers. The thing was being so hurried through, as amateur theatricals should be to go well, that the whole thing would be over in two and a half weeks more. As Phyllis was personally very much liked by the principal, there was very little trouble made about it. Indeed, the teachers planned to take notes and borrow costumes, and give the thing themselves as a commencement entertainment the next June, if it proved possible. The boys were rather harder to get, but here, too, they succeeded, finally. And "Iolanthe" went prosperously on. In a couple more days Phyllis, who really could get almost anything she wanted from almost anybody, if she took the trouble, coaxed Joy back from Mrs. Hewitt. "You'll have her most of the rest of your natural life," she pleaded. "And I saw her first. I think I ought to have her now." So Mrs. Hewitt reluctantly gave her up, and she went back to the Harrington house. She saw scarcely less of John, because he continued to come regularly to see them in the mornings on his way home, and generally got in a little visit in the afternoons, not counting the fact that he took her on his rounds with him three days out of five. And then, of course, there were the rehearsals. "My dear," he remonstrated with her, as they were on their way home from one of these, "I don't want to seem to scold you, but you shouldn't let young Gray put his arm around you the way he does." "Put his arm around me?" demanded Joy, quite honestly surprised. "Why, what do you mean? Oh--the rehearsals! Why--why, John! You and Allan have to put your arms around Gail every little while, and so does everybody else. And I'm supposed to be _Strephon's_ mother. People have to, in theatricals."