'I'm the Wemyss the newspapers were full of last week,' he said, seeing that the name left her unmoved. 'My God,' he went on, again wiping his forehead, but as fast as he wiped it more beads burst out, 'those posters to see one's own name staring at one everywhere on posters!'
'Why was your name on posters?' said Lucy.
She didn't want to know; she asked mechanically, her ear attentive only to the sounds from the open windows of the room upstairs.
'Don't you read newspapers here?' was his answer.
'I don't think we do,' she said, listening. 'We've been settling in. I don't think we've remembered to order any newspapers yet.'
A look of some, at any rate, relief from the pressure he was evidently struggling under came into Wemyss's face. 'Then I can tell you the real version,' he said, 'without you're being already filled up with the monstrous suggestions that were made at the inquest. As though I hadn't suffered enough as it was! As though it hadn't been terrible enough already——'
'The inquest?' repeated Lucy.
Again she turned her head and looked at him. 'Has your trouble anything to do with death?'
'Why, you don't suppose anything else would reduce me to the state I'm in?'
'Oh, I'm sorry,' she said; and into her eyes and into her voice came a different expression, something living, something gentle. 'I hope it wasn't anybody you—loved?'