Mrs. Hewitt seemed to have
constituted herself a committee of welcome, and was accepted on all
sides as being about to stay to dinner.
All the rooms in the house were sunny, and at the window of Joy's
there tapped a spray from a rambler rose. There was so much to see
and hear and smell out the window that Joy had a hard time getting
dressed. She put back on her gray silk. Grandmother had packed all
the pretty picture-frocks for her, but she didn't feel as if she
could stand wearing any of them yet; but she was beginning to think
that these people supposed she had only two dresses. To tell the
truth, she was getting a little tired of wearing first the gray and
then the brown and then doing it over again. But she pinned the
spray of roses that had tempted fate by sticking itself in her
window, on the bosom of her dress, and ran down.
She found that, much as she had looked out the window, she was
earlier than the others. Phyllis and Allan were nowhere to be seen,
and Mrs. Hewitt she knew was above stairs yet, because she had heard
her singing to herself as she moved about the next room. Philip,
exempted from an early bedtime by special dispensation and the
knowledge that he wouldn't go to sleep this first night, anyway, was
being wisely unobtrusive in a corner of the room, spelling out a
fairy-book. The only other occupant of the room, Joy saw, was her
trial fiance.
It was the first time she had been all alone with John since their
talk in the wood.
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