Then she saw a
shy-looking couple over in the corner, and went over, to try to put
them at ease.... She wouldn't have thought about people being shy or
needing putting at ease before she went away!...
"Something _has_ happened to me," thought Joy. Then she thought
what it was. Why, she was doing the way John would have done--thinking
about other people's feelings, not her own, for one minute. It felt
warm in her heart. She had that for a keepsake from John, anyway.
But she found she was making a mistake to think about John. After a
half-hour of moving about the long parlors she fled. The little dark
place in the back hall was just the same. Six weeks, naturally, had
not altered it.
She sat down on the bottom step in a little heap, with her face in
her hands, under Aunt Lucilla's triumphant picture. She remembered
it above her, but she did not want to look at it.
"I wish you hadn't egged me on, Aunt Lucilla," she said most
unfairly from between her hands.
She did not know how long she had sat there, when she heard a little
squeak, and looked up with her heart jumping. It sounded like the
squeak doors make that haven't been opened for--say--six weeks or
two months....
There in the ray of light from the chandelier in the room behind,
the light glinting on his fair curly hair, he stood as he had stood
before, the wishing-ring man.
For a moment Joy thought she was seeing something that wasn't so.
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