"It must be something you want very badly—something you don't want other people to see—something you're ashamed of!—or you wouldn't be searching for it at this time of night." She raised her eyes, still with the same strange yet flaming quiet, from the littered floor to his face. Then suddenly glancing again at the scattered papers—"That's your hand-writing!—they're your letters! letters to Mrs. Fairmile!"
"Well, and what do you make of that?" cried Roger, half wroth, half inclined to laugh. "If you want to know, they are the letters I wrote to Chloe Fairmile; and I, like a careless beast, never destroyed them, and they were stuffed away here. I have long meant to get at them and burn them, and as you turned me out to-night——"
"What is that letter in your hand?" exclaimed Daphne, interrupting him.
"Oh, that has nothing to do with you—or me——" he said, hastily making a movement to put it in his coat pocket. But in a second, Daphne, with a cry, had thrown herself upon him, to his intense amazement, wrestling with him, in a wild excitement. And as she did so, a thin woman, with frightened eyes, in a nurse's dress, came quickly into the room, as though Daphne's cry had signalled to her. She was behind Roger, and he was not aware of her approach.
"Daphne, don't be such a little fool!" he said indignantly, holding her off with one hand, determined not to give her the letter.
Then, all in a moment—without, as it seemed to him, any but the mildest defensive action on his part—Daphne stumbled and fell.
"Daphne!—I say!—--"
He was stooping over her in great distress to lift her up, when he felt himself vehemently put aside by a woman's hand.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, sir! Let me go to her."
He turned in bewilderment. "Miss Farmer! What on earth are you doing here?"