"It's hard to realize, I know," she said apologetically. She lifted the wonderful braids and bound them crownwise around her head, tying the ends together behind as if they were pieces of ribbon, and tucking them under with a comb, from behind one ear. She anchored them in front with the other comb, and smiled flashingly at him again. "Now it seems real, doesn't it? And now I'll tell you all about it--that is, if you have the time." He looked again at the lovely, earnest little face under the crown of hair, and nodded gravely. She was not like any girl he had ever known.... She was like the girls you imagined might exist, sometimes, and wondered if you'd like them, after all, if they did. He wanted her to go on, at least, and felt stealing over him a conviction that she couldn't have done so particularly wrong. Joy felt the lessened severity of his attitude, and took courage from it as she began. "You remember that day you came to Grandfather's? You remembered my name, so I'm sure you do remember the rest. Well, that day I was especially unhappy because--well, it's hard to explain the because. Things were just as good as they always had been, really; only that day I couldn't stand them any more. You know things _can_ be that way." She looked at him expectantly, and he nodded again. "It was a forlorn little life for a child like you--oh, I keep forgetting!" He laughed. "But even nineteen," he explained, "isn't particularly aged to an elderly gentleman of thirty-four." "As old as that?" queried Joy. She looked at _him_ again in the light of new information, but she shelved it for the time, and went on with her defense. "Well, that afternoon, when things were perfectly down to the very flattest bottom--'and not a ray of hope to gild the gloom'--you came. And things brightened up. You know you told me that if I hoped along, things I wanted would come?" "I do know it!" said John with a fervor she did not understand. "Well, they did!" she announced, looking at him radiantly, and pausing a little so he would have time to realize it. John Hewitt's patients had always told him that just his coming in made them better, and he had simply accepted the faculty as useful in his work. But he had never thought that his personality could affect a perfectly well person. At Joy's tribute, unconsciously given, his pulse quickened a little. Had he really had this much power for happiness over the child?... "Almost right away they brought me to this lovely place," she went on happily, "and almost right after that I met the Harringtons. It's all seemed to me because of your wishing ring." "What wishing ring?" he asked, smiling indulgently at her, as one does at a child's fancies.