"Her cold."
No. . . . I hope not." She glanced around at him, but he pretended to be examining the front of a house across the road. She put up her hand to pat and finger the coil of hair at the back of her head; and when he looked at her again, noticing her silence, he saw that her arm was shaking.
"Wh—what's the matter?"
The irrepressible quiver of laughter in his voice set her off; and with her first convulsive choke, he snickered. They began to laugh in a sort of suppressed hysteria, blundering along through the snow together, unable to look at each other and breaking out into fresh spasms of giggles infectiously like a pair of children.
"I didn't say anything," he protested.
"You're so funny!" she cried. And that started them afresh.
They had gone a block before they recovered control of themselves; and even then their conversation was interspersed with unreasoning smiles and amused silences. But that laughter had broken down the restraint that separated them; it had joined them in an unconscious conspiracy against her mother; and it had brought them nearer to the camaraderie of their Coulton days. No matter what commonplaces they spoke now, there was a sparkling undercurrent, unexpressed and really inexpressible, flowing beneath their words, almost in a secret understanding, like the furtive twinkles of two actors who had been joking together in the wings before they came out on
