She stopped. She had moved him at last.
III
Mr. Letham laid down his razor—slowly, letting the handle slip noiselessly from his fingers to the dressing-table. Slowly also he lifted his face towards his wife, and she saw his mild forehead all puckered, his eyes dimmed with a bemused air, his loose mouth parted: she particularly saw the comical aspect given to his perturbation by its setting of little patches of soap with the little trickle of red at the chin.
He put out a hand for the paper and made a slow step towards her. "Eh?" he said—a kind of bleat, it sounded to her.
"No! Listen!" she told him. "Listen to this at the end of the account," and she spread the sheet in her hands. A little difficult to find the place ... a little difficult to control her voice.... "Listen!" and she found and read aloud, in jerky sentences, the paragraph that had been made out of "cuttings about Lord Burdon."
Almost in a whisper the vital clause "...the successor is of a very remote branch—Mr. Maurice Redpath Letham, whose paternal great-grandfather was the eighth baron...."
And in a whisper, dizzy again with the amazement of it: "Maurice! Do you realise?"
His turn for bewilderment. He ignored her appeal. He did not heed her agitation. He took the paper from her and she read that in his eyes—preoccupation with some idea outside her range—that caused her own to harden. She crossed and stood against the bed rail, and she eyed him with narrowing gaze as he read Our Own Correspondent's despatch.
"Poor young beggar!" he murmured, following the story. "Poor, plucky young beggar!"
She just watched his face, comical with its dabs of drying soap, reddening a little, eyelids blinking. She watched him reach the fold of the paper, ignore the paragraph relating to himself, and turn again to Our Own Correspondent's account. "Poor—poor, plucky young beggar!" he repeated.