"It's socks," he confessed with a boyish shame-facedness. "I—I'd like to see how you'd look doing them. I can't quite make myself see you, even now.... I suppose I'm silly—I'd like to see you sitting under the light in there, sewing for me, just once."
"You mean mending, not sewing," Joy told him cheerfully. However the wishing ring may have felt about the request, the princess was frankly delighted, "Have you got many? I do them very fast!"
John still looked doubtful. He still seemed to feel that it was a mean advantage to take of the most domesticated ring and princess.
"You see," he explained, "Mother's idea is—and it's likely a very good one—that when socks have holes you throw 'em away and get more. She doesn't make allowance, though, for one's getting attached to a pair. And I bought six pairs lately that I liked awfully well, and I hated to see them die.... They're just little holes."
"I'll get them and do them as soon as we're through dinner," she promised. "Won't your mother mind?"
"She'll be delighted," John promised sincerely. "But she hasn't them. I have."
Accordingly, after dinner Joy demanded them, and John produced them, while she got out her mending-basket, something he had never suspected her of possessing, he told her.
She sat down under the lamp with her work, tying on the little sewing-apron Mrs. Hewitt had given her the day before.
"Why, they scarcely have holes at all," she marveled. "I can do lots more than these."
"There are lots more," said John rather mournfully. But he did not feel particularly mournful. He was absorbed in the picture she made sitting there by the lamp, near the fire, her red mouth smiling to itself a little, and her black lashes shadowing her cheeks as her hands moved deftly at her work. John himself, on the other side of the fire, had a paper across his knees, but he forgot to read it, watching her. She seemed to turn the place into a home, sitting there quietly happy, swiftly setting her tiny, accurately woven stitches.