"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.

"I can't help it," she told him imploringly. "I simply cannot help
laughing. It is funny, you know. She was scolding me--"

"_Scolding_!" George exclaimed.

That beauty should be scolded!

"Scolding--yes. Oh, I'm only a--well, scolding me, and I was wishing,
_wishing_ I could escape. And then suddenly out I shot. And then I
look around and she's--" A wave of her hand expressed a disappearance
that was by magic agency.

"But, _scolding_?" George said. "Need you trouble? She will be all
right."