“DEAR MR. FREDERIC,—Please, please believe that I want nothing from you, that I am happier as I am. I don’t want my boy ever to know who his father was. He is mine by all the love I have given him. I could not share him with you, and to let you do anything for him would be sharing, wouldn’t it? I have thought no ill of you for a long time now. I was to blame just as much as you. That is all over. You cannot take me into your life, therefore I cannot take you into mine . . .”
Frederic was interrupted in the reading of it and slipped it into the pocket of his coat.
His long absences had begun to stir jealousy in his wife. She was spying on him. She found the letter, her jealousy burst into flame, and thereafter was no peace in Frederic’s house, nor any moment of sweetness and ease.
Once more, with horrible hypocrisy, Jessie resumed her habit of walking with her husband to the little iron gate in the morning, and meeting him there in the evening, and the old ladies and gentlemen, who had been a little anxious, peered through their windows and smiled their blessings.
Mrs. Folyat always said that Frederic’s house reminded her of Eden before the Fall.
[XXXI
NEWS FROM MINNA]
| “Sir” cries Adams, “I assure you she is as innocent asmyself.” | ||
| JOSEPH ANDREWS. | ||
MRS. FOLYAT found the position of a grandmother entirely to her liking—the maximum of opportunity for beatific clucking with no responsibility. Annette had three children, Gertrude two, and Minna two, and Mrs. Folyat had already a large collection of their sayings for quotation in company, the most popular being an ode addressed by Annette’s second boy to Mr. Gladstone, who had visited our town several times when its allegiance to the Liberal cause began to waver.
Minna brought her two children to stay in Burdley Park. They came for a fortnight and stayed four months. They would have stayed longer but that Francis began to be anxious and, after a good deal of cogitation, shyly questioned Minna as to her husband’s doings.