"How like my husband!" said Mrs. Fielding impatiently, fidgeting up and down the long drawing-room with a fretful frown on her pretty face. "Why didn't you put a stop to it, Miss Moore? You might so easily have said that the storm had upset me and I wasn't equal to a visitor at the dinner-table to-night." She paused to look at herself in the gilded mirror above the mantel-piece. "I declare I look positively haggard. I've a good mind to go to bed. Only if I do—" she turned slowly and looked at Juliet—"if I do, he is sure to be brutal about it—unless you tell him you persuaded me."
Juliet, seated in a low chair, with a book on her lap, looked up with a gleam of humour in her eyes. "But I am afraid I haven't persuaded you," she said.
Mrs. Fielding shrugged her white shoulders impatiently. "Oh, of course not! You only persuade me to do a thing when you know that it is the one thing that I would rather die than do."
"Am I as bad as that?" said Juliet.
"Pretty nearly. You're coming to it. I know you are on his side all the time. He knows it too. He wouldn't tolerate you for a moment if you weren't."
"What a horrid accusation!" said Juliet, with a smile.
"The truth generally is horrid," said Mrs. Fielding. "How would you like to feel that everyone is against you?"
"I don't know. I expect I should find a way out somehow. I shouldn't quarrel," said Juliet. "Not with such odds as that!"
"How—discreet!" said Mrs. Fielding, with a sneer.
"Discretion is my watchword," smiled Juliet.