"All right, have it your way."
"Well," she said presently, with some doubt in her mind, "if you don't know and just to prove to you that I do know, it's the sister of that young Koerner!"
Gibbs looked at her a long time in a kind of silent contempt. Then he said in a tone that dismissed the subject as an absurdity:
"You've passed; the nut college for you."
Jane fingered the metal snake that made the handle of her bag; now and then she sighed, and after a while she was forced to speak--the silence oppressed her:
"Well, I'll stay and see, anyway."
"Jane, you're bug house," said Gibbs quietly.
Somehow, at the words, she bowed her head on her hands and wept; the black ribbon on her hat shook with her sobbing.
"Oh, Dan, I am bug house," she sobbed; "that's what I've been leery of. I haven't slept for a month; I've laid awake night after night; for four days now I've been going down the line--hunting her everywhere, and I can't find her!"
She gave way utterly and cried. And Gibbs waited with a certain aspect of stolid patience, but in reality with a distrust of himself; he was a sentimental man, who was moved by any suffering that revealed itself to him concretely, or any grief or hardship that lay before his own eyes, though he lacked the cultured imagination that could reveal the sorrows and the suffering that are hidden in the world beyond immediate vision. But she ceased her weeping as suddenly as she had begun it.