"I was--trying to make it come true, Auntie Dorrie," this with a suspicious break in the voice.

"What, darling?" Doris came down and took the child in her arms.

"Mary says if you believe anything hard enough you can make it come true. _She_ always can! I wanted to play with the fountain girls--I know it would be beautiful--but you have to be _like them_. You have to shut the whole world out--and then you know what they know."

"Why, little girl, do you think the fountain children are happier than you and Nancy?"

With that groping that all mothers feel when they first confront the _individual_ in the child they believed they knew Doris asked her question.

"I've used Nancy and me all up!" was Joan's astonishing reply.

"All up?" the two meaningless words were the most that Doris could grasp.

"Yes, Aunt Dorrie. Dolls and Mary's silly stories and Nancy's funny games all over and over and over until they make me--sick!"

Joan actually looked sick, so intense was she.

"Nan is happy always, Aunt Dorrie--she's made like that--but I use things up and then I want something else. Mary said that, honest true, things would come if you believed hard enough. Maybe I cannot believe hard enough--or maybe Mary didn't speak truth. She doesn't always, Aunt Dorrie."

Doris gasped and drew the child closer. It was like being dragged, by the little hand, to an unsuspected danger that she, not the child, understood.

Gradually the inner side of the years was turned out by Doris's careful questions and Joan's quiet simplicity. She revealed so much now that she found that her view of life had a dramatic interest. It appeared, quite innocently, that Nancy could a.s.sume any position in order to win her way.

"She always speaks truth, Auntie Dorrie," Joan loyally defended, "but she can make truth out of such queer things; it just _is_ truth to Nancy, for she doesn't want to hurt people's feelings. Mary likes Nancy best, for I cannot make truth when I want to. Aunt Dorrie--truth is--a--_a thing_, isn't it?"

"Yes, darling. But we--we see it differently, that is all."

This was comforting to Joan, and she smiled. Then Mary again took the centre of the stage--Mary's interpretations, all coloured with the mystery of her desolate childhood; her old superst.i.tions and power to control by the magic of her imagination. There were certain tales, it seemed, that were held as bribes. Nancy would always succ.u.mb to the lures; Joan, only to a few.

"What are they, dear? I love fairy stories, you know."

Doris was keeping her voice cool and calm.

"Why, Mary says there is a Rock on a big mountain that is--bewitched!

And everything near it is, too. She says things grow on it and you look at them and they are alive, and you can--can, well, use them! Mary saw a road once and just went up on it--it was a bewitched road, and she got--lost!" Joan's eyes widened. "Mary says she'll have to find her way back somehow, and if Nancy and I are naughty, she'll go and find it at once! Nancy is afraid, but I told Mary I'd follow her!

"And then Mary said that once she just longed and longed for a doll--she had never had one--and she saw The Ship on The Rock and she went up to it--that was before she got lost on the road--and she asked the captain of The Ship for a doll, and he said he would send one to her. And she went home and that very night--that _very_ night, Aunt Dorrie, she looked in a room where she heard a funny noise and she saw a live doll!

And while she was looking she saw a tall big lady bring in another. You see, when The Rock gets alive, everything is alive and Mary had forgot that--and so the dolls were--were babies. Nancy believes that, but I--tried it on Nancy's dolls--and it isn't true!"

The rain outside beat wildly against the windows; the wind lashed the vines and roared down the chimney.

"Are--you asleep, Aunt Dorrie?" The silence awed Joan.

"No, dear heart. I am just thinking."

And so Doris was--thinking that she was walking in the dark. Her own small flashlight had seemed enough to guide her, and here she discovered that it had only shown her one path, the one she had chosen, and all the other paths--Mary's, Nancy's, and Joan's--had been disregarded.

Suddenly it seemed as dangerous to have too much faith as too little.

"I want you, Joan, dear, to go up and play, now, with Nancy. See if you cannot take all the old games and make a new one. That would be such a pleasant thing to do."

"Must I, Auntie Dorrie? I'd rather stay here close to you. It's a new game. I like it here."

It was hard to send the small, clinging thing away, but Doris was firm.

Once alone, she closed her eyes and let her hands fall, palms upward, on her lap. She felt tired and perplexed. There had come a parting of the ways. Apparently the ninth year was a dangerous year. What must she do?

Was Mary more ignorant than she seemed or--more knowing? What had Mary known at Ridge House?

The dull, quiet girl, as Doris recalled her, seemed merely a part of the machinery of the Sisters' Home; she had never taken her into account--but had she been what she seemed? What was she now?

It was appalling--in the doubt as to what was, or was not--to think that so much had been taken for granted.

The children had seemed babies. The mere physical care had been the main consideration, and while that was going on Joan had grown weary of the old games and Nancy had learned to gain her ends by indirect methods.

Clearly, Doris must have help at this juncture.

"I see," she thought on, heavily, "why fathers _and_ mothers are none too many where children are concerned."

It was then that she thought of David Martin in a strangely new way--a way that brought a faint colour to her cheeks.

All the afternoon she thought of him while she, having set Mary to other tasks, devoted herself to Nancy and Joan. She read to them, scampered through the house with them, did anything and everything they suggested, until she had subdued the nervous strain and could laugh a bit at her bugbears of the morning. Joan, flushed and towzled, Nancy, sweetly radiant, effaced the menacing images her anxiety had created--but she still needed help. And David Martin was the one, the only one among her friends who seemed adequate to her need.

"I've tried to be a mother," she thought, "but I have taken the father out of their lives--I must supply it."

When the children were in bed and the house quiet, Doris went to the sunken room and, taking up the telephone receiver, called her number.

She was calm and at peace. She was prepared to lay the whole matter of the past few years before David Martin, and she was conscious, already, of relief.

"I am going to let myself--go!" she thought, her ear waiting for a reply.

It was Martin who answered.

"David, are you quite free for an hour?"

"For the entire evening, Doris. Are the children sick?"

How like Martin that was! What most concerned and interested Doris was first in his thought.

Doris's face twitched.

"It's my friend," she said, slowly, "that I want. Not my physician."

"I'll be there in a half hour."

The soft drip of the rain outside was soothing. So happy did Doris feel that she wondered if her fears would not strike Martin as absurd, and after all, why should she lay her burden of confession upon him in order to ease her perplexity? Along this line she argued with herself while she ordered a tray to be sent up as soon as Doctor Martin arrived.

She gave particular instructions as to the preparation of the dainties Martin enjoyed but which no one but Doris ever set before him.

"I chose the shield of silence," she mused. "Why should I ask another to help me with it now?"