"Oh, that wasn't what I meant," she assured him. Then her mood suddenly changed. "John, you have what one of Grandfather's anarchist friends called a real from-gold heart. But you don't have to do that unless..." "Unless what?" demanded John, quite coldly removing all of himself that he could from her half of the seat. Joy's eyes fixed themselves on the distant scenery--excellent scenery, all autumn reds and yellows. "I'll tell you the 'unless' tomorrow morning," she answered him sweetly, but none the less firmly. "You are playing with me, Joy, I think," John answered in his most diagnostic tone--the exact tone in which he would have said, "You have smallpox, Joy, I think." "Why, yes," she answered him demurely. "We were to, weren't we?" "You'll have to wait out here a while; I have a case here," he told her in a voice which held a note of endurance. She sat quite still, after suppressing a faint impulse to ask him if she should hold the motor. She leaned back and gave herself up to the country sights and sounds and scents, gently ecstatic. "Oh, Aunt Lucilla!" she was saying inwardly. "You'd be proud of me!" Joy was actually playing--he had said so--playing with a man! CHAPTER SEVEN A VERY CHARMING GENTLEMAN "You look lovely," said Phyllis heartily. She herself was radiant in a rose satin that made her look, as her small son remarked ecstatically, like a valentine. "Mustn't it be horrid to be a man and always wear the same black clothes?" "M'yes," answered Joy absent-mindedly. "If I look as nice as you do I don't have to worry. But--but will Gail Maddox be very much dressed?" "She will," replied Phyllis decisively. "If I know Gail, she'll look like a Christmas tree. But don't let that weigh on your mind, dear child. Nobody could look better than you do, if Viola and I did combine two of your frocks into one. Could they, Viola?" The colored girl, who had been doing the masses of Joy's bronze hair while her mistress, kneeling by the dressing-table, put the finishing touches to some frock-draperies, giggled. "Well dressed? Why, Miss Joy looks like the vampire in the movie show!" "Final praise!" sighed Phyllis. "You never told me I was as well dressed as a vampire, Viola." "You couldn't live up to vampiring, nohow, Mrs. Harrington, nor you shouldn't want to, not with that goldy hair of yours," said Viola reprovingly. "Virtue is thrust upon me, in other words," said Phyllis. "Evidently you have possibilities of crime, Joy!" They went down, laughing, to where Allan and John were waiting for them, Allan walking the floor in his usual quick, boyish fashion, John sitting at a table reading, by way of economizing time. Being a doctor, he had a way of snapping up odds and ends of time and doing things with them.