They drifted off, Phyllis to attend to her housekeeping, Allan to
his long-distance leases, and Philip to find Angela, whom he never
forgot for long. She had breakfast with her nurse, and Philip felt
it was time he looked her up. He adored his little sister, and spent
the larger part of his days in teaching her everything he had been
taught, which was sometimes hard on Angela, who obeyed him
implicitly.
As for Joy, she strayed out into the garden again. The feeling of
intense, happy aliveness in a wonderful world was still on her, and
she wanted to be alone to think things out--to think out especially
the thing she had discovered last night--and what to do about it.
It was as warm as June by this time, for the sun was getting higher,
and she went slowly down the paths with the sun shining on her hair
and making it look like fire, breaking, as she went, a few more
flowers to pin in her dress. She had put on one of her old
picture-frocks, a straight dull-cream wool thing that she wore in
the mornings at home, girdled in with a silver cord about the hips.
She fitted the garden exceedingly well, though nothing was further
from her thoughts.
At the far end, among a tangle of roses and beneath a group of
shade-trees, the Harringtons had set a little fountain, a flat,
low-set marble basin with a single jet of water springing high, and
falling almost straight down again. Its purpose was to cool the air
on very hot days, but it always flowed till frost, because it was so
pretty Phyllis never could bear to have it shut off. Joy loved the
half-hidden, lovely place, though she had only had one glimpse of it
before, and she sat down by it and began to try to think things out.
She had a much harder thinking to do than she'd had for a long time.
"A 'hard world for gentlemen'!" meditated Joy, and laughed as she
trailed one hand in the water. "It's a much harder one for ladies,
if Allan but knew it!"
She bent over, half-absently, to watch the water in the basin. It
fascinated her, the flow of it, and it helped her to reason things
out. There were several things that needed reasoning.
To begin with--there was no use saying it wasn't so, for it was--she
was in love with John.... Her heart beat hard as she looked down
into the water and said the words in her mind. It would have been
lovely to do nothing but sit there and think of him. There were so
many different wonderful things he had for her to think about; his
steady eyes that changed from warm-gray to steel-gray, and back, and
could look as if they loved you or hated you or admired you or
fathered you, while the rest of his face told nothing at all; the
little gold glint in his fair hair and the way it curled when it was
damp weather; his square, back-flung shoulders; the strong way he
had of moving you about, as if you were a doll--the way his voice
sounded when she said certain words--
Joy pulled her thoughts from all that by force.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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