I--" She interrupted him with laughter, and Mary Vertrees's laugh was one which Bibbs's father had declared, after the house-warming, "a cripple would crawl five miles to hear." And at the merry lilting of it Bibbs's father's son took heart to forget some of his trepidation.

"I'll be any kind of idiot," he said, "if you'll laugh at me some more.

It won't be difficult for me." She did; and Bibbs's cheeks showed a little actual color, which Mary perceived.

It recalled to her, by contrast, her careless and irritated description of him to her mother just after she had seen him for the first time.

"Rather tragic and altogether impossible." It seemed to her now that she must have been blind.
They had passed the New House without either of them showing--or possessing--any consciousness that it had been the destination of one of them.
"I'll keep on talking," Bibbs continued, cheerfully, "and you keep on laughing.