Joyce laughed.
“No, indeed. You won’t pay me rent. If you try to I’ll pay you for your mother’s love and care. How would that be? And I don’t want to sell the house. I love it. I like to think it’s there for me to come home to now and then. And Nan, you don’t need to feel hampered there. You can arrange things just as you like, just as if it were your own. Just treat me like a sister, that’s all, and share with me in what there is.”
“I’m sure that’s very generous in you, Joyce,” said Gene, feeling a sense of shame over the way he had always treated her. “We’ll think about it. Aren’t you coming home with us now?”
“Why, I’ll be down tomorrow, I guess,” she said pleasantly. “I want to get all these papers signed and everything fixed. I must be back on my job Monday, you know.”
“I shouldn’t think you’d have to teach now,” said Nan, an envious note in her voice. “Why don’t you just telegraph them you aren’t coming back, and quit?”
“Why, that wouldn’t be honorable,” laughed Joyce. “And besides I like it. I wouldn’t leave the kiddies for anything till the term is up.”
“You’re a queer girl,” said Nan speculatively. “I don’t see why you don’t just want to have a good time.”
“Why, I’m having a beautiful time,” said Joyce, wide-eyed. “I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do.”
They went home, and the evening passed and still Darcy did not come. Joyce began to wonder if he were not coming at all. If, perhaps, she might be going to have to write him a note or call him up or something; for she did not mean to go back to Silverton without telling him in so many words how glad she was that he had found her Lord.
Joyce spent Friday in going over her things in the old home and packing up what she wanted to take back with her to Silverton, but she went back at night to Judge Peterson’s. The minister and his wife came in to call that evening and they had a beautiful talk, but all the time Joyce was listening for a step that did not come, and wondering. Was Darcy still shy? Surely he would come just once after all that had happened, after she had come home to make things straight and set him free.