Instantly she bent far over toward him with intuitive scrutiny. Under her breath one word escaped:
“Ah!”
It was the breath of a discovery—a discovery of something unknown to her.
“I am sparing you, Josephine!”
She stretched each arm along the back of the sofa and pinioned the wood in her clutch.
“Are you sparing me?” she asked in a tone of torture. “Or are you sparing yourself?”
The heavy staff on which he stood leaning dropped from his relaxed grasp to the floor. He looked down at it a moment and then calmly picked it up.
“I am going to tell you the story,” he said with a new quietness.
She was aroused by some change in him.
“I will not listen! I do not wish to hear it!”