"I thought you had left me," he said. "There was such a silence that I fancied you had gone out of the room."
"Will you come out of it with me now?" Her strength seemed to fail her while she asked the question; her head drooped on her breast, and she let the letter fall on the floor at her side.
"Are you tired already, Rosamond? Your voice sounds as if you were."
"I want to leave the room," she said, still in the same low, faint, constrained tone. "Is your knee easier, dear? Can you walk now?"
"Certainly. There is nothing in the world the matter with my knee. If you are tired, Rosamond—as I know you are, though you may not confess it—the sooner we leave the room the better."
She appeared not to hear the last words he said. Her fingers were working feverishly about her neck and bosom; two bright red spots were beginning to burn in her pale cheeks; her eyes were fixed vacantly on the letter at her side; her hands wavered about it before she picked it up. For a few seconds she waited on her knees, looking at it intently, with her head turned away from her husband—then rose and walked to the fire-place. Among the dust, ashes, and other rubbish at the back of the grate, were scattered some old torn pieces of paper. They caught her eye, and held it fixed on them. She looked and looked, slowly bending down nearer and nearer to the grate. For one moment she held the letter out over the rubbish in both hands—the next she drew back shuddering violently, and turned round so as to face her husband again. At the sight of him a faint inarticulate exclamation, half sigh, half sob, burst from her. "Oh, no, no!" she whispered to herself, clasping her hands together fervently, and looking at him with fond, mournful eyes. "Never, never, Lenny—come of it what may!"
"Were you speaking to me, Rosamond?"
"Yes, love. I was saying—" She paused, and, with trembling fingers, folded up the paper again, exactly in the form in which she had found it.
"Where are you?" he asked. "Your voice sounds away from me at the other end of the room again. Where are you?"
She ran to him, flushed and trembling and tearful, took him by the arm, and, without an instant of hesitation, without the faintest sign of irresolution in her face, placed the folded paper boldly in his hand. "Keep that, Lenny," she said, turning deadly pale, but still not losing her firmness. "Keep that, and ask me to read it to you as soon as we are out of the Myrtle Room."