message of importance. Then both came to
a stop simultaneously, but Bibbs made a heroic effort, and as they began
to walk on together he contrived to find his voice.

"I--I--hate a frozen fish myself," he said. "I think three miles was too
long for you to put up with one."

"Good gracious!" she cried, turning to him a glowing face from which
restraint and embarrassment had suddenly fled. "Mr. Sheridan, you're
lovely to put it that way. But it's always the girl's place to say it's
turning cooler! I ought to have been the one to show that we didn't know
each other well enough not to say SOMETHING! It was an imposition for
me to have made you bring me home, and after I went into the house I
decided I should have walked. Besides, it wasn't three miles to the
car-line. I never thought of it!"

"No," said Bibbs, earnestly. "I didn't, either. I might have said
something if I'd thought of anything. I'm talking now, though; I must
remember that, and not worry about it later. I think I'm talking, though
it doesn't sound intelligent even to me. I made up my mind that if I
ever met you again I'd turn on my voice and keep it going, no mater what
it said. 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. I'm amounting to something in the world this afternoon. I'm
making a noise, and that makes you make music. Don't be bothered by my
bleating out such things as that. I'm really frightened, and that makes
me bleat anything. I'm frightened about two things: I'm afraid of what
I'll think of myself later if I don't keep talking--talking now, I
mean--and I'm afraid of what