The directness of her question startled him.
"Why do you ask that?" he managed to stammer.
"You have flinched twice when I touched it—this arm."
"A trifle," he assured her. "It should have healed by this time."
She smiled straight up into his eyes.
"You are too true to tell me fairy stories in a way that I must believe them, Philip. Day before yesterday your sleeves were up when you were paddling, and there was nothing wrong with this arm—this forearm—then. But I'm not going to question you. You don't want me to know." In the same breath she recalled his attention to her father and mother. "I told you they were lovers. Look!"
As if she had been a little child John Adare had taken his wife up in his arms and sat her high on the trunk of a fallen tree that was still held four or five feet above the ground by a crippled spruce. Philip heard him laugh. He saw the wife lean over, still clinging for safety to her husband's shoulders.
"It is beautiful," he said.
Josephine spoke as if she had not heard him.
"I do not believe there is another man in the world quite like my father. I cannot understand how a woman could cease to love such a man as he even for a day—an hour. She couldn't forget, could she?"