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Page 210
ing his return for that reason. Papa still believes the Welsh are cowed and will not rise. As for Ianif there is no trouble by summer, then Owain and I will both have been mistaken and Ian can come homeand no one will be more glad than I. I am bone weary and talked hoarse, and I am not sure I have accomplished my purpose."
"You have done as well as any man could," Joanna soothed, "and I am sure you do your father an injustice in saying he believes any ill of you."
"Perhaps," he replied discontentedly, "but I am rubbed raw somewhere within, and I am ready to leap down any throat that offers."
"So I noticed," Joanna rejoined provocatively, controlling a quirk of the lips. Apparently, Geoffrey did not wish to be soothed so it was a good wife's duty to quarrel with him to his heart's content. Joanna had been told over and over that too great compliance was no virtue, and she had been told also how Queen Berengaria had lost her husband from a reluctance to give him a cause to rage at her.
If Geoffrey heard her invitation to begin to quarrel anew, he gave no sign of it. He continued speaking along a path already open in his mind. "And then my father, who can sometimes be as great a fool as any man alive, tells me he asked the king not to summon me to keep me from fighting in the" Geoffrey stopped and uttered a bald obscenity. Only a few hours after Ela had skinned him for speaking of fighting with pleasureand he knew Joanna felt the samehe had put his foot in his mouth again.
Joanna blinked at the word, not because she was shocked by it but because she could not understand what had set Geoffrey off. He had ignored her promising invitation to an argument, but then she noticed he was eyeing her with some trepidation. Apparently he expected her to be angry. She would have been happy to oblige him, but there was nothing at all in what he had been saying that could offend her.
"What is it?" she asked, willing to be cooperative, but puzzled.
"I was about to speak of something that gives me plea-

 
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