“Important, how so?” asked Harry.
“How so, my dear Harry? Why, you can’t be serious—you haven’t forgot that the succession to Wyvern depends on it,” exclaimed Charles Fairfield.
“Bah! Wyvern indeed! why, man, the thought never came near me—me Wyvern! Sich pure rot! We Fairfields lives good long lives mostly, and marries late sometimes; there’s forty good years before ye. Gad, Charlie, you must think o’ summat more likely if you want folk to believe ye. Ye’ll not hang me on that count, no, no.”
And he laughed.
“Well, I think so; I’m glad of it, for you know I wrote to tell you about what is, I hope, likely to be, it has made poor little Alice so happy, and if there should come an heir, you know he’d be another squire of Wyvern in a long line of Fairfields, and it wouldn’t do, Harry, to have a doubt thrown on him, and I’m glad to hear you say the pretence of that d——d woman’s marriage is a lie.”
“Well, you know best,” said Harry. “I’m very sorry for Alice, poor little thing, if there’s ever any trouble at all about it.”
And he looked through the windows along the tops of the tufted trees that caught the sunlight softly, with his last expression of condolence.
“You have said more than once, I don’t say to-day, that you were sure—that you knew as well as I did there was nothing in that woman’s story.”
“Isn’t that some one coming?” said Harry, turning his head toward the door.
“No, no one,” said Charles after a moment’s silence. “But you did say so, Harry—you know you did.”