"Mr. Osborne, it would seem, has—read it? He even thought the contents of sufficient importance to repeat them to his typist? Is that so?"
"Mr. Osborne repeats many things to me, Miss Marsh—by habit. You being a stranger to him, do not know him well yet, but I have been with him some time, you see. As to his reading it, I know that you telegraphed him not to, and he received the telegram before the letter, I admit; but, the letter once in his hand, it became his private property, of course. He had a right to read it."
A stone in Rosalind's bosom where her heart had been ached like a wound; yet her lips smiled—a hard smile.
"But then, having read, to be at the pains to seal it down again!" she said. "It seems superfluous, a contemptible subterfuge."
"Oh, well," sneered Hylda, with a pouting laugh, "he is not George Washington—a little harmless deception."
"But you cry out all his secrets!"
"To you."
"Why to me?"
"I save you from troubling your head about him. He is not so friendless as you have imagined."
"Happy man! And was it you who wrote me the anonymous information that he was not Glyn but Osborne?"