The Wishing-Ring Man Part 5

"Oh, _I'll_ be a little dog," replied Philip, entering agreeably into the idea, and backing up to be chained. "No, I'll be a big dog. I'll run around an' jerk my chain an' say 'Woof! Woof!'

like the Hewitts' setter. And Foxy 'n I'll have bones together!" His small Velasquez face lighted rapturously at the prospect. "Here, Foxy, Foxy!"

The black French bull whose chain Philip was using dashed up at the summons. He was middle-aged, but he had a young heart still, and his tail vibrated madly as he bounded between Phyllis and her son.

"Oh, he's _got_ a bone!" exclaimed Philip, gleefully dropping on all fours.

Phyllis stood up from chaining her child, and turned appealingly to her husband, coming down the steps of the little bungalow with two-and-a-half-year-old Angela on his shoulder.

"You look like a colored ill.u.s.tration from the _Graphic_," she said irrelevantly. "You're just in time to a.s.sist discipline.

_Look!_" she pointed tragically to her victim.

He would have been happily disputing the opportune bone with Foxy, had not that faithful animal's devotion led him to hand it over at once.

"Faver, make him take it away from me!" he demanded. "Faver, I'm all chained up! I'm a little dog!"

Little Angela, who looked like a slim, tiny Christmas-card _Christ-kind_, and was as fascinating a little demon as ever coquetted with the world at large, struggled to get down, and demanded to be chained up and be another little dog. Her father set her down, whereat she made a bolt for the dog, the bone, and her happily engaged brother.

"Do you think there's any way of conveying to him that this is not a new amus.e.m.e.nt, Allan?" demanded his mother, half-laughing.

"Don't let's try," said Allan promptly. "Everything's going beautifully. Philip's happy, and Angela's going to be gloriously dirty in a minute, which will give her nurse something to wash. You know how bitter Viola is about never getting the children to herself for a minute."

Phyllis slipped an arm through her tall husband's, as they stood by the steps together.

"No, but Allan, what _would_ you do?"

Allan laughed.

"Send him back to Wallraven, and tell Johnny Hewitt to see that he's plunged into the middle of the chickenpox epidemic we fled from. How would you like that, young man?"

Philip looked up with deprecating politeness, on being directly addressed.

"Please, Faver, if you don't mind my name's Jinks! You must say, 'Here, Jinks,' and I say 'Woof! Woof!' and wag my tail."

"Say wuff!" echoed Angela, with a dazzling smile at her elders, and an effort not to tumble over on the gra.s.s.

Phyllis pounced on her babies at Allan's alarming suggestion, and managed to hug them both at once; an ordeal which Philip stood with every evidence of pleasure, and Angela under protest.

"My poor little lambs! ... Allan, this is the first chickenpox they've had up there since the summer we came. We'd been married a month or so, and you weren't quite sure whether you liked me or not.

Do you remember?"

"I remember that first summer," said he. "It's the only part of those seven years that I do want to remember. But the chickenpox part of it had escaped me."

"Well, of course," his wife admitted, "in those days children's diseases were nothing whatever in our lives. But when Johnny Hewitt refers to it as that wonderful summer seven years ago, I have discovered that he means it was wonderful because he saved forty-three out of forty-three cases, not because you and I had married each other to please your mother, and were finding out that it was rather nice."

"I'll be hanged if I know to this day what possible niceness there was for you in being married to a man everybody thought would never get well," said Allan.

"He was you," explained Phyllis matter-of-factly, sitting down on a step to look at him better. "Anybody'd fall in love with you, Allan.

You know perfectly well that it even happens now."

"Certainly," said he scornfully. "My well-known beauty and charm attract all cla.s.ses; they besiege my path by day and night. By Jove, Phyllis, there's one now, the flapper I saw in the dining-room lately. She's doubtless come over to say that she'll wait for me till you're through, being young. She's pretty, too."

Phyllis laughed, and patted his foot, the only part of him she could reach without getting up. "Now, now--I meant no harm. You can't help being attractive.... Why, it's the girl in brown, the one who started out of a tree like a dryad, and showed me the way Philip had gone, last night. She was the loveliest creature I ever saw. Look, Allan, she's like a Rossetti picture."

"She _is_ like a Rossetti," he answered, "but she looks rather happier. Most of the Rossetti ladies I ever saw hoped to die of consumption shortly."

Joy, coming slowly over the gra.s.s on an errand from her grandfather, kept her eyes on the ground, because that way it was easier to remember the message she had to repeat up and down the rows of cottages dotted among the trees. So it was not until she was quite close that she knew Phyllis again.

Philip barked her a cheerful greeting, and Phyllis rose to greet her.

"I am Alton Havenith's granddaughter," Joy began, and then interrupted herself joyfully.

"Oh, it's my lady in green!" she cried. "You didn't see me when you came back."

"I looked for you," Phyllis explained, holding out both hands in welcome, "but it was too dark to see you. I thought you had gone home. Did you say you were Alton Havenith's granddaughter? I love his poems. I'm Phyllis Harrington, and this is my husband. I'm eternally grateful to you for helping me find my little boy. You see I've made sure he won't escape again."

"He isn't chained for life, as you might infer from that," Allan explained.

Philip ceased being a dog for the moment, and held his hand out amiably to Joy.

"I'm Philip," he explained, following his mother's example and introducing himself. "They called me Philip 'cause it was the nearest thing Faver could get to Phyllis. You see, they didn't know there was going to be Angela. This is Angela. Isn't she pretty?"

Angela, on being righted and shown off, produced her usual dazzling smile, and gave Joy a sweet, sidelong look out of her azure eyes--the look she knew conquered people. They were both, as Phyllis often said, _such_ satisfactory children for exhibition purposes!

"Oh, aren't they darlings!" cried Joy, forgetting her mission gladly. "Will--will they mind if I hug them?"

"Not a bit," answered their father, whom Joy had asked. "They are practically indestructible, and they like petting."

Joy knelt down, putting a shy arm around baby Angela, who, after a moment's survey of her, kissed her frankly of her own accord, with two tight little arms around her neck.

Allan had an idea that the newcomer would be more at ease alone with Phyllis and the children, so he made some excuse about golf (which he hated) and disappeared. Joy sat down on the gra.s.s, with Angela momentarily in her lap, and Foxy, who hinted that he, too, liked kind words, at her side.

She had never had so many people (counting dogs) act as if they liked really her. Foxy and the children didn't care a bit whose granddaughter she was, and Mrs. Harrington, too, had made friends with her without minding. But she was conscientious, and she felt she ought to go on with her errand before she really gave herself up to the enjoyment of her call.

"My grandfather is giving a reading from his works this evening,"

she said, sitting up mechanically and crossing her hands, "and he sent me to say that he would be glad if you and Mr. Harrington would care to come."

"We'd love to," Phyllis answered on the spot. "At his cottage?"

Joy nodded.

"It's fun," Phyllis went on, "leading this semidetached life, with no responsibilities whatever. There's only one drawback as far as I'm concerned; if Philip strays off too far somebody may take him for a rabbit or a deer. The places where there's hunting are only two miles away. That's why Allan and I were scouring the woods last night for him. Usually we let him run away as much as he likes, and the poor child can't understand the new arrangement."

Joy looked down at Philip, who had curled himself into an indiscriminate heap with the dog, and was taking a nap by way of whiling away his imprisonment.

"Do you hunt?" she asked.

Phyllis shook her head.

"The way the gun bangs when it goes off worries me. I believe there's a bangless gun, but even so, you're expected to kill things, and I think the things are much happier alive. I don't even like the taste of them cooked. But Allan hunts. He brings game-bags full of poor little dead things back whenever he's where he can do it. He hasn't yet, here. We just came, you know."