"What is?"
"Pretty much everything, I guess."
As he spoke, a song came to them from a lighted window over their heads. Then the window darkened abruptly, but the song continued as Alice went down through the house to wait on the little veranda. "Mi chiamo Mimi," she sang, and in her voice throbbed something almost startling in its sweetness. Her father and mother listened, not speaking until the song stopped with the click of the wire screen at the front door as Alice came out.
"My!" said her father. "How sweet she does sing! I don't know as I ever heard her voice sound nicer than it did just then."
"There's something that makes it sound that way," his wife told him.
"I suppose so," he said, sighing. "I suppose so. You think———"
"She's just terribly in love with him!"
"I expect that's the way it ought to be," he said, then drew upon his pipe for reflection, and became murmurous with the symptoms of melancholy laughter. "It don't make things less of a puzzle, though, does it?"
"In what way, Virgil?"
