“Perhaps it is no such great secret after all, my dear. Say now, isn’t his name Henry Graves, and doesn’t he live at a place called Rosham?”
“Who told you that?” asked Joan, springing up and standing over her. Then she remembered herself, and sat down again upon the bed. “No, that’s not the name,” she said; “I never heard that name.”
“Nobody told me,” answered Mrs. Bird quietly, ignoring Joan’s denial. “I saw the name in those poetry books that you are so fond of, and which you lent me to read; and I saw one or two notes that you had made in them also, that’s all. I’ve had to watch deaf-and-dumb people for many years, my dear, and there’s nothing like it for sharpening the wits and teaching one how to put two and two together. Also you could never hear the name of Henry without staring round and blushing, though perhaps you didn’t know it yourself. Bless you, I guessed it all a month ago, though I didn’t think that it was so bad as this.”
“Oh! it’s mean of you to have spied on me like that, Mrs. Bird,” said Joan, giving in; “but it’s my fault, like everything else.”
“Don’t you fret about your faults, but just go to bed, there’s a good girl. I will come back in half an hour, and if I don’t find you fast asleep I shall be very angry.” And she put her arms about her and kissed her on the forehead, as a mother might kiss her child.
“You are too kind to me, a great deal too kind,” said Joan, with a sob. “Nobody ever was kind to me before, except him, and that’s why I feel it.”
When Mrs. Bird had gone, Joan undressed herself and put on a wrapper, but she did not get into bed. For a while she wandered aimlessly backwards and forwards through the doors between the two rooms, apparently without much knowledge of what she was doing. Some note-paper was lying on the table in the sitting-room, where the gas was burning, and it caught her eye.
“Why shouldn’t I write?” she said aloud: “not to him, no, but just to put down what I feel; it will be a comfort, to play at writing to him, and I can tear it up afterwards.”
The fancy seemed to please her excited brain; at any rate she sat down and began to write rapidly, never pausing for a thought or words. She wrote:—
“MY DARLING,—