Her husband turned toward the place from which the sound of her voice had reached him, with a mixed expression of perplexity and surprise in his face. "You pass so suddenly from one subject to another," he said, "that I hardly know how to follow you. What in the world, Rosamond, takes you, at one jump, from a romantic argument about a situation in a novel, to the plain, practical business of reading an old letter?"
"Perhaps there is a closer connection between the two than you suspect," she answered.
"A closer connection? What connection? I don't understand."
"The letter will explain."
"Why the letter? Why should you not explain?"
She stole one anxious look at his face, and saw that a sense of something serious to come was now overshadowing his mind for the first time.
"Rosamond!" he exclaimed, "there is some mystery—"
"There are no mysteries between us two," she interposed quickly. "There never have been any, love; there never shall be." She moved a little nearer to him to take her old favorite place on his knee, then checked herself, and drew back again to the table. Warning tears in her eyes bade her distrust her own firmness, and read the letter where she could not feel the beating of his heart.
"Did I tell you," she resumed, after waiting an instant to compose herself, "where I found the folded piece of paper which I put into your hand in the Myrtle Room?"
"No," he replied, "I think not."