Kensington roads were not so smoothly paved then as they are now, and the wheels rattling over the cobblestones prevented Philip from hearing what she said. He said, “What?” and she, with a sense of being rebuffed, only felt inclined to reply, “You seemed to be enjoying yourself so much, I was sorry to take you away.”
“The enjoyment was nothing, one way or the other,” he returned; “but it seemed rather absurd to make so sudden a retreat—don’t you think so?”
“You would not think it absurd if you knew my reasons: I could not help it,” said Marion quickly.
“Well, I am ready to hear them,” rejoined Philip, with an air of judicial impartiality.
Marion had some resentful reply on the tip of her tongue, but she checked herself in time. “I think I would rather wait till we get home,” she said at length. “We cannot talk comfortably in this noise.”
Philip signified his assent to this arrangement by folding his arms and leaning back in his corner of the carriage; and very few words more were exchanged between the new husband and wife during the rest of the drive: so that by the time they arrived at the house, both felt as if they had in some intangible way been injured. But Marion had the more elastic temper of the two, and she reminded herself that Philip had, after all, some reason to be out of sorts; and when she turned to him at last, in the solitude of their room, it was with a face smiling, though pale.
“Now, my Philip, you are going to be astonished!” she said. “In the first place, I have been reading a letter written to you.”
Philip looked a little blank, running through in his mind all the imaginable persons who might have written him letters which he would not have wished Marion to read; but he almost immediately replied, “Why didn’t you speak of it before we left home?”
“I put it in my pocket and didn’t read it till after we arrived: it was from Mr. Fillmore, Philip” (Philip’s brow relaxed) “and the reason I opened it was that I was expecting one from him and thought this was it. But it was not. It was about something ... I should never have expected. I hope you will think about it as I do. Oh, how happy I should be then!”