But, being in a reminiscent mood, she presently told Roma how she had been deceived in old Granny Jenks' identity, and how indignantly the old woman had denied the imputation of having been her nurse. "I was so sure of her identity that her anger was quite embarrassing," she said. Roma's thoughts returned to granny's affection for herself, and she felt sure the old woman had lied to her mother, though from what object she could not conceive. Her abject affection for herself seemed fully explained by the fact of her having been her nurse child. But she was, somehow, ill at ease after hearing her mother's story, and longed eagerly to know more than she had already heard. "I wonder if I dare question papa or the old doctor?" she thought when her mother had left her alone, resting easily in her furred dressing gown and slippers before a bright coal fire, while in the room beyond Dolly Dorr was getting her bath ready. Roma was devoured by curiosity. She sat racking her brain for a pretext to intrude on her father and the old doctor, who were still in the library together, chatting over old times when the Clarkes had lived in Brookline. A lucky thought came to her, and she murmured: "I will pretend to have a headache, and ask Doctor Jay for something to ease it. Then I will stay a while chatting with them and making myself very agreeable until I can bring the subject around, and get the interesting fact of my abduction out of them." Stealing noiselessly from the room, she glided downstairs like a shadow, pausing abruptly at the hall table, for there lay the evening's mail, just brought in by a servant from the village post office. Roma turned over the letters and papers, finding none for any one but her father, but the superscription on one made her start with a stifled cry. She recognized the elegant chirography of Jesse Devereaux on the back of one letter. "Now, why is he writing to papa?" she wondered, eagerly turning the letter over and over in her burning hand, wild with curiosity that tempted her at last to slip the letter into her bosom. Then, taking the rest of the mail in her hand, Roma went to the library, thinking that the delivery of the mail would furnish another plausible pretext for her intrusion. There was a little anteroom just adjoining the library, and this she entered first to wait a moment till the fierce beating of her heart over Devereaux's letter should quiet down. Her slippered feet made no sound on the thick velvet carpet, and, as she rested for a moment in a large armchair, she could hear the murmur of animated voices through the heavy portières that hung between her and the library. Believing that the whole family had retired, and that they were safe from interruption, Doctor Jay and his host had returned to the tragedy of eighteen years before--the loss of the infant that had nearly cost the mother's life.