"It is nothing but my foolishness," she answered, leading him back to the chair from which he had risen. "I was going to show you something in a paper I am copying, and just in time I remembered that I had particularly promised not to show it to anybody."
He regarded her curiously.
"But why," he asked, with a certain deliberateness which somehow made her uneasy, "did you want to show it to me."
"Because—because—"
She could not equivocate, and her innocent soul had had little training in the arts of evasion.
"Because what?"
Stanton leaned back in his chair, holding her by the shoulders as she sat upon his knee, and searching her face with his strong brown eyes. Milly's glance drooped.
"Don't ask me, John," she responded, putting her hand against his cheek, wistfully. "Don't you see I couldn't tell you without letting you know what is in the paper, and that is precisely the thing I promised not to do."
There are few men in whom a woman's open refusal to yield a point, no matter how trifling, does not arouse a tyrannous masculine impulse to compel obedience. Stanton had really no great curiosity about the secret, whatever it might be, but he instinctively felt that it was right to demand the telling because his betrothed refused to speak. His face grew more grave. The hands upon Milly's shoulders unconsciously tightened their hold. The girl intuitively felt that a struggle was coming, although even yet the signs were hardly tangible. She grew a little paler, putting her hand beneath her lover's bearded chin, and holding his face up so that she could look straight into his fearless, honest eyes.
"Dear John," she said, wistfully, "you know I never have a secret of my own that I keep from you in all the world."