“Mrs. Fellowes, forgive my troubling you with my affairs but you are so very kind,—I have hopes, very dear hopes, and from various strange sensations in the region of my heart when my struggles with Dacre have been specially trying and prolonged, I have reason to fear some fundamental lesion of the organ.”
Mr. Gedge had just been reading up the heart in some medical journal, he had also lately ascertained that his maternal aunt had died of Angina-pectoris, so he was naturally upset in his mind.
“If one has hopes, Mrs. Fellowes,” he went on sadly, “one’s duty seems to be to guard against anything that must interfere with such hopes, always supposing them to be lawful and right.”
“Indeed, I quite agree with you,” said Mrs. Fellowes with much heartiness, and with an unholy tendency to laughter, “I agree with you, and no doubt, as is the way of such things, your hopes are bound up in the hopes and happiness of another. For her sake alone you must consider your position seriously.”
“Yes, I will turn my thoughts to some other sphere of action, but before I leave here,” he added with solemn resolve, “I deem it my duty to my employers to represent to them the urgent advisability of sending my elder pupil to a public school—I know you agree with me in this, Mrs. Fellowes?”
“Agree with you! why, we have been fighting for it for years.”
“Then I may rely on your and your husband’s help in this matter?” he asked, looking rather askew admiration at her through his eyeglasses.
He had received a slight injury to one eye in his youth, and according to Dacre it was now “a game one”.
By these suggestions of Mr. Gedge it will be seen that Gwen’s leaven was working.