" Joy began
nervously in the middle. "And you know Gail does tell anything about
anybody she wants to, especially if she thinks it makes a funny
story,--sometimes I think perhaps she likes making people
ridiculous.... She doesn't care about feelings...."
"Why, you poor child, have you a dark secret?" asked Phyllis,
smiling. "Let me hear the worst. I promise to love you still."
"Oh _please_ do!" implored Joy. She dropped her head on the
couch cushions and talked with her face hidden on one arm. "Phyllis,
I--I never was engaged to John!"
The bombshell did not at all have the effect she had expected.
"I'm sorry to contradict you, but you certainly are," said Phyllis
placidly.
"You don't understand," went on Joy, coming out from her shelter.
"Listen."
So she told Phyllis, with both her quivering little hands locked in
one of Phyllis' strong, firm ones, the whole story--the story of the
shut up, youthless life among the people who came to give her
grandfather homage, and regarded her as a plaything or a
stage-property, and of how she had seen the two young lovers one wet
day, and been stirred into a wild rebellion for a youth of her own.
"I understand," said Phyllis here. "You were 'half-sick of shadows.'
I went through that myself. There comes a time when you'd do
_anything_."
"You understand?" asked Joy with wide eyes, "you with a husband that
adores the ground you walk on?"
"I do understand," affirmed Phyllis, with her mind flying back for a
moment to a gray February day in a Philadelphia library--a day that
was eight years old now.
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