Though she was far from understanding him, he had become an intimate friend, and she treated him as such.

True, he was unlike any other man she had ever met, but that fact had ceased to embarrass her.

She accepted him as he was.
He came back at length and sat down, smiling at her, though somewhat grimly.
"You will pardon your poor jester," he said, "if he fails to make a joke on your last night.

He could make jokes--plenty of them, but not of the sort that would please you." Anne said nothing.

She would not, if she could help it, betray to any how much she was dreading the morrow.