“Our engagement secret! Your mother thinks it! Did you ask Mrs. Filmer’s permission to offer yourself to me?” As she spoke, she gently withdrew from his embrace and looked with a steady countenance at him. Harry was like a man between two fires; his face burned, he felt almost irritable. Why couldn’t Yanna take what he had to offer, and be content?
“Mother lifted a book in my room,” he said, “and a copy of the letter I sent you fell out of it.”
“And she read one of your letters? I am glad you have told me. I certainly shall not write to you, Harry. I withdraw my promise.”
“Oh, nonsense, Yanna! It fell out of the book, and she looked at it; after that, any woman would have gone on looking at it.”
“Very few women would have gone on looking at it.”
“Mothers, I mean. Mothers feel they have a right, you know. I ought not to have left it there. It was my fault; but the whole house has been in such a miserable confusion, with the packing and the ball; and it has been Harry here, and Harry there, and the truth is, mother called me while I was writing, and she was in a great hurry, and I slipped the letter into the book, and when I got back I had forgotten where I put it. I looked everywhere, and as there was a fire burning on the hearth, I concluded that I had burnt it.”
“Which you ought to have done.”
“Yes; but then, Yanna, mother had to know.”
“I wish I had known first. What did she say?”