"Miss Bodine, you are not capable of such cruelty. You know it is very early yet."
"I thought you came to call on Mrs. Willoughby?"
"So I did, and I have called on her. See her talking ancient history to those dowagers yonder. What a figure I'd cut in that group."
She laughed outright, as much from nervous trepidation as at the comical idea suggested, and was in an inward rage that she did so, for she had intended to be so dignified and cool as to depress and discourage the "objectionable person" who hedged her in.
"What a jolly, infectious laugh you have!" he resumed. "To be able to laugh well is a rare accomplishment. Some snicker, others giggle, chuckle, cackle, make all sorts of disagreeable noises, but a natural, merry, musical laugh-Miss Bodine, I congratulate you, and myself also, that I happened in this blessed afternoon to hear it. And that terrible chaperon of yours isn't here either. How she frowned on me the other evening as if I were a wolf in the fold," and the young man broke into a clear ringing laugh at the recollection.
Ella was laughing with him in spite of herself. Indeed the more she tried to be grave and severe the more impossible it became.
"Mr. Houghton," she managed to say at last, "will you do me a favor?"
"Scores of them."
"Then stop making me laugh. I don't wish to laugh."
His face instantly assumed such portentous and awful gravity that he set her off again to such a degree that the dowagers in the other room looked at her rebukingly. It was bad enough, they thought, that she should talk to old Houghton's son at all, but to show such unbecoming levity-well, it was not what they would "expect of a Bodine." Ella saw their disapproval, and felt she was losing her self-control. The warnings she had received against her companion embarrassed her, and banished the power to be her natural self.