For the very next day things began to
happen.
They were just finishing breakfast when a telegram came.
"I suppose it's from the De Guenthers, telling us which train to
meet," Phyllis said carelessly, as she opened it.... "Oh!"
"What is it, dear?" asked Allan at her exclamation of distress.
She handed him the telegram.
"Isabel suddenly ill with inflammatory rheumatism. Fear it may
affect heart. Can you come on?"
"They're the nearest thing either of us has to relatives," Phyllis
explained to Joy. "Inflammatory rheumatism! Oh, Allan, we ought to go."
She looked at him across the table, her blue eyes distressed and wide.
"Of course you shall go, my dearest," Allan told her gently, while
Joy wondered what it would be like to have some one speak to her in
that tone. The Harringtons were so careless and joyous in their
relations with each other, so like a light-hearted, casually
intimate brother and sister, that it was only when they were moved,
as now, that their real feelings were apparent.
Joy looked off and out the window, and lost herself in a day-dream,
her hand, as usual, mechanically feeling for the rough carving of
John's ring.
"To be in John's house, close to him, like this, and to have him
speak to me so--wouldn't it be wonderful?" she thought, with a warm
lift of her heart at even the vision of it. She forgot the people
about her for a little, and pictured it to herself.
She had only seen two rooms of the Hewitt house, and that when they
were dressed out of all homelikeness, because of the reception.
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