Phyllis always took the least nerve-wearing way--you could count on her for that. She listened encouragingly. "Gail said last night she--she knew my dark secret." Joy began nervously in the middle. "And you know Gail does tell anything about anybody she wants to, especially if she thinks it makes a funny story,--sometimes I think perhaps she likes making people ridiculous.... She doesn't care about feelings...." "Why, you poor child, have you a dark secret?" asked Phyllis, smiling. "Let me hear the worst. I promise to love you still." "Oh _please_ do!" implored Joy. She dropped her head on the couch cushions and talked with her face hidden on one arm. "Phyllis, I--I never was engaged to John!" The bombshell did not at all have the effect she had expected. "I'm sorry to contradict you, but you certainly are," said Phyllis placidly. "You don't understand," went on Joy, coming out from her shelter. "Listen." So she told Phyllis, with both her quivering little hands locked in one of Phyllis' strong, firm ones, the whole story--the story of the shut up, youthless life among the people who came to give her grandfather homage, and regarded her as a plaything or a stage-property, and of how she had seen the two young lovers one wet day, and been stirred into a wild rebellion for a youth of her own. "I understand," said Phyllis here. "You were 'half-sick of shadows.' I went through that myself. There comes a time when you'd do _anything_." "You understand?" asked Joy with wide eyes, "you with a husband that adores the ground you walk on?" "I do understand," affirmed Phyllis, with her mind flying back for a moment to a gray February day in a Philadelphia library--a day that was eight years old now. "I think I can understand anything you are going to tell me." But Joy went on to the day when she had hidden on the stairs to get away from the people, and John had come in, with the light glinting on his hair, and catching in the ring on his finger. "I suppose I fell in love with him then, though I didn't know what it was," Joy confessed. "And when I met you and Philip and Allan I loved you all so, too, and it seemed so queer you liked me--just me, you know, not somebody's granddaughter that he used for trimmings!" "Who wouldn't?" said Phyllis matter-of-factly. "So far as I can see, most people are crazy over you." "And Grandfather wouldn't let me go unless I'd been engaged--or he said that was the only reason--he thought I couldn't be, of course. And--and it flew out. And I used John's name when he cornered me, because I remembered him, and how kind he'd been. And on top of that----" "And on top of that John turned up! Good gracious!" said Phyllis. She could not help a little laugh but her face sobered swiftly. "_Think_ of that man's cleverness and self-control! Why--why, Joy, no man would do all that unless he cared for you a little, anyhow."