A pucker of her brows darkened the quick mirth that came to her eyes. She cried: “Oh, don't joke. She will be killed.”
“You were not alone?”
“No—oh, no! What has happened to her?”
“We had better follow.”
She corrected his number. “Yes, I had better. Thank you so much for your help.” She took a step; faltered upon it with a little exclamation of pain; put a white tooth on her lip.
“You have hurt your foot?” George said.
“My ankle, I think. Oh dear!” and then again she laughed.
It came even then to George that certainly she would have made her fortune were she to set up a gloom-exorcising bureau—waiting at the end of a telephone wire ready to rush with that laugh to banish the imps of melancholy. Never had he heard so infectious a note of mirth.
“Oh, what must you think of me?” she ended. “I simply cannot help laughing, you know—and yet, oh dear!”
She put the tips of the fingers of a hand against her lower lip, gazed very anxiously up the road, and then again she gave that clear pipe of laughter.