The water dripped over the small body; Joan’s lips were moving in some weird incantation, and then with the light all gone from her pretty face she came out of the basin, pulled her clothing on as best she could, and flung herself tragically in a deep chair.

For a moment Doris thought the child was crying, but she was not.  Her limp little body relaxed and the eyes were sad.

Doris rose and went to the steps.

“Why are you here alone, Joan?” she asked.

Quite simple the reply came: 

“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 assume 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 superstitions and power to control by the magic of her imagination.  There were certain tales, it seemed, that were held as bribes.  Nancy would always succumb to the lures; Joan, only to a few.