Aunt Lucilla Havenith, red of lip, flashing of eye, blue and silver
of gown, laughed on down at her great-grand-niece, who was holding a
surreptitious little red candle up to talk to her. Aunt Lucilla,
from all accounts, had had too excellent a time in her life to mind
a little thing like being put in a back hall afterwards. She had
been a belle from her fifteenth year, eloped with her true-love at
sixteen, and gone on being a belle all the rest of her life, in the
intervals of three husbands and ever so many children. She had
managed everything and everybody she came across gaily all her life;
she had been proposed to by practically the whole Society of the
Cincinnati; and had died at eighty-three, a power and a charmer to
the last.

"I don't think you need to mind dark corners one bit," said Joy,
tipping the candle so that the red wax dribbled down on her slim
fingers. "If Rochambeau and Lafayette and all the rest of the people
in the history-books had made a fuss over _me_--"

Joy sat down on the stairs again, on a cushion. Nobody used the back
stairs, fine curly ones that they were, and Joy's cushion, which she
had put there on purpose to be mournful on a fortnight before, was
untouched since last time.

Joy Havenith was nineteen, but you never would have known it. She
had been told so often by her grandparents that she was only a child
yet, that she quite believed it. No, not quite--but enough to make
her a little shy, and have almost the expression and manner still of
a little girl. She had big, black-lashed, kitten-blue eyes, scarlet
lips, and two ropes of bronze hair that she wanted very badly to put
up. It sounds like rather an exciting personality, but Joy was so