“About everything. I was not in that war at all; and as for the expedition, I had a few adventures, of course, and most of those stories are true, but it was not that way I got smashed. You have detected me in one lie, so I may as well confess the lot, I suppose.”
“Does it not seem to you rather a waste of energy to invent so many falsehoods?” she asked. “I should have thought it was hardly worth the trouble.”
“What would you have? You know your own English proverb: 'Ask no questions and you'll be told no lies.' It's no pleasure to me to fool people that way, but I must answer them somehow when they ask what made a cripple of me; and I may as well invent something pretty while I'm about it. You saw how pleased Galli was.”
“Do you prefer pleasing Galli to speaking the truth?”
“The truth!” He looked up with the torn fringe in his hand. “You wouldn't have me tell those people the truth? I'd cut my tongue out first!” Then with an awkward, shy abruptness:
“I have never told it to anybody yet; but I'll tell you if you care to hear.”
She silently laid down her knitting. To her there was something grievously pathetic in this hard, secret, unlovable creature, suddenly flinging his personal confidence at the feet of a woman whom he barely knew and whom he apparently disliked.
A long silence followed, and she looked up. He was leaning his left arm on the little table beside him, and shading his eyes with the mutilated hand, and she noticed the nervous tension of the fingers and the throbbing of the scar on the wrist. She came up to him and called him softly by name. He started violently and raised his head.
“I f-forgot,” he stammered apologetically. “I was g-going to t-tell you about——”
“About the—accident or whatever it was that caused your lameness. But if it worries you——”