“If I can!” he said, in a low voice.

“Ah, that’s very pretty!” she laughed.  “You’re such an honest person, it’s pleasant to have you gallant sometimes, by way of variety.”  She became grave again immediately.  “I hear myself laughing as if it were some one else.  It sounds like laughter on the eve of a great calamity.”  She got up restlessly, crossed the room and leaned against the wall, facing him.  “You’ve got to go back to that place?”

He nodded.

“And the other time you did it—­”

“Just over it,” said Bibbs.  “Two years.  But I don’t mind the prospect of a repetition so much as—­”

“So much as what?” she prompted, as he stopped.

Bibbs looked up at her shyly.  “I want to say it, but—­but I come to a dead balk when I try.  I—­”

“Go on.  Say it, whatever it is,” she bade him.  “You wouldn’t know how to say anything I shouldn’t like.”

“I doubt if you’d either like or dislike what I want to say,” he returned, moving uncomfortably in his chair and looking at his feet—­ he seemed to feel awkward, thoroughly.  “You see, all my life—­until I met you—­if I ever felt like saying anything, I wrote it instead.  Saying things is a new trick for me, and this—­well, it’s just this:  I used to feel as if I hadn’t ever had any sort of a life at all.  I’d never been of use to anything or anybody, and I’d never had anything, myself, except a kind of haphazard thinking.  But now it’s different—­ I’m still of no use to anybody, and I don’t see any prospect of being useful, but I have had something for myself.  I’ve had a beautiful and happy experience, and it makes my life seem to be—­I mean I’m glad I’ve lived it!  That’s all; it’s your letting me be near you sometimes, as you have, this strange, beautiful, happy little while!”

He did not once look up, and reached silence, at the end of what he had to say, with his eyes still awkwardly regarding his feet.  She did not speak, but a soft rustling of her garments let him know that she had gone back to her chair again.  The house was still; the shabby old room was so quiet that the sound of a creaking in the wall seemed sharp and loud.

And yet, when Mary spoke at last, her voice was barely audible.  “If you think it has been—­happy—­to be friends with me—­you’d want to—­to make it last.”

“Yes,” said Bibbs, as faintly.

“You’d want to go on being my friend as long as we live, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” he gulped.

“But you make that kind of speech to me because you think it’s over.”

He tried to evade her.  “Oh, a day-laborer can’t come in his overalls—­”

“No,” she interrupted, with a sudden sharpness.  “You said what you did because you think the shop’s going to kill you.”

“No, no!”

“Yes, you do think that!” She rose to her feet again and came and stood before him.  “Or you think it’s going to send you back to the sanitarium.  Don’t deny it, Bibbs.  There!  See how easily I call you that!  You see I’m a friend, or I couldn’t do it.  Well, if you meant what you said—­and you did mean it, I know it!—­you’re not going to go back to the sanitarium.  The shop sha’n’t hurt you.  It sha’n’t!”