"Hurry, Joy, train's coming," was all he said, and caught her arm, whisking her aboard. She pulled back, but that made no difference. He had her established in a seat, with what Phyllis called his "genial medical relentlessness," in spite of her appeals. "But I _can't_ go!" she protested weakly from her seat, as the train pulled out of the station. "But, you see, you have," was John's placidly unanswerable reply, as he stowed his light overcoat on the rack above them and laid her coat over that with maddening precision. He smiled at her protectingly. "Why, my dear child, what made you lose your nerve that way at the last minute?" Then Joy understood that he had not heard the blow fall. If it had been anybody but John she would have been much more embarrassed than she was, but by now she had come unconsciously to feel that when things went wrong John was the natural person to come to. He could always help her through them. "Grandmother told me--" she began, then stopped. It was pretty hard to tell, after all. "Go on," he told her encouragingly. "Grandmother told you what?" "She told me that she wrote your mother, and your mother said--she said she wished we'd told her; but, anyway, she's sent out invitations for a big party--to meet _me_!" It all came with a rush. She didn't dare to meet John's eyes after she had said it. She heard his long, low whistle of astonishment, scarcely suppressed in time, and a lower, but quite as fervent, "Great Scott!" and then silence. It was not for a full minute that she dared look in the direction of his chair, which he had swung away when she had told him. She gave one quick glance, then another longer one. She could not see his face, but his shoulders were shaking.... Had it moved him so? Joy was used, at Grandfather's, to hear of people being "moved." "I didn't think John was the kind of a man to have emotions outside of him that way," she thought a little disappointedly, "but I suppose an awful thing like this--" About then he turned himself toward her. He was laughing! "Do you think it's funny?" she demanded. "Funny?" replied John Hewitt, still laughing desperately, and trying quite as desperately to do it quietly enough to prevent the descent of the others, wanting to know what he was laughing at. "I think it's one of the funniest things that ever happened. Talk about Nemesis--if ever a punishment fitted the crime, this does!" Joy sighed relievedly. At least, he wasn't being angry about it, and he might very well have been. She glanced out the window, which, like the windows of most New England cars in summer, had evidently been closed ever since John Hancock died, and glued in place. Then suddenly the thing struck her as funny, too. They were in for it, and by their own act. She began to laugh with him, quite forgetting that she had more explanations before her, and as a really honorable girl had no alternative but going back to Grandmother with her sins on her head.