his voice.
"I've never been able to apologize quickly," he said, with his
accustomed slowness, "because if I try to I stammer. My brother Roscoe
whipped me once, when we were boys, for stepping on his slate-pencil.
It took me so long to tell him it was an accident, he finished before I
did."

Mary Vertrees had never heard anything quite like the drawling, gentle
voice or the odd implication that his not noticing the motionless state
of their vehicle was an "accident." She had formed a casual impression
of him, not without sympathy, but at once she discovered that he was
unlike any of her cursory and vague imaginings of him. And suddenly she
saw a picture he had not intended to paint for sympathy: a sturdy boy
hammering a smaller, sickly boy, and the sickly boy unresentful. Not
that picture alone; others flashed before her. Instantaneously she had a
glimpse of Bibbs's life and into his life. She had a queer feeling, new
to her experience, of knowing him instantly. It startled her a little;
and then, with some surprise, she realized that she was glad he had sat
so long, after getting into the coupe, before he noticed that it had
not started. What she did not realize, however, was that she had made
no response to his apology, and they passed out of the cemetery gates,
neither having spoken again.

Bibbs was so content with the silence he did not know that it was
silence. The dusk, gathering in their small inclosure, was filled with a
rich presence for him; and presently it was so dark that neither of the
two could see the other, nor did even their garments touch. But neither
had any sense of being alone. The wheels creaked steadily, rumbling
presently on paved streets; there were the sounds, as from a distance,
of the plod-plod of the horses; and sometimes the driver became audible,
coughing asthmatically, or saying, "You, JOE!" with a spiritless flap of
the whip upon an unresponsive back. Oblongs of light from the lamps
at street-corners came swimming into the interior of the coupe and,
thinning rapidly to lances, passed utterly, leaving greater darkness.
And yet neither of these two last attendants at Jim Sheridan's funeral
broke the silence.

It was Mary who preceived the strangeness of it--too late. Abruptly she
realized that for an indefinite interval she had been thinking of her
companion and not talking to him. "Mr. Sheridan," she began, not knowing
what she was going to say, but impelled to say anything, as she