“No, nothing. For a long time doubtless we shall know nothing.”
“How hard your voice is, Francis,” replied the invalid. “This woman has bewitched him, you see, the poor boy.”
“Feebleness is one kind of guiltiness.”
She was struck by this rigid tone, and pressing the button of the electric light, beheld her husband looking as if stricken with a sudden old age, so pale and hollow-eyed that she felt at once a presentiment of danger.
“Francis,” she begged of him, “there is something else that you’re hiding from me. Am I not your comrade as I used to be, from whom you have no secrets?”
He moved nearer toward the bed. “Why no, dear wife, there’s nothing else. Isn’t our son’s desertion of us enough?”
Sitting up again, her arms stretched out, she only entreated him the more.
“I can read in your look some terrible menace that hangs over us. Don’t spare me as you did last night. Speak. I shall be brave.”
“You are exciting yourself needlessly. There’s nothing.”
“I swear to you that I shall have the courage to bear it. Don’t you believe me?”