“Oh, Mr. Fairfax! worse, far worse than nothing! He looks at us as if his heart would break. He has known us all our lives. He steals out through the garden not to see me. But I know what he means, I know very well what he means,” Alice said with irrestrainable tears.
“But the other one from London—Sir Thomas: he is coming?”
“This afternoon: but it will not do any good. Mr. Fairfax, will you telegraph once more to Paul? I don’t think he believes us. Tell him that papa——”
“Don’t say any more, Miss Markham; I understand. But one moment,” said Fairfax; “Paul will not like to find me here. No, there is no reason why—we have never quarrelled. But he will not like to find me here.”
“You have been very kind, very good to us, Mr. Fairfax; you have stayed and helped us when there was no one else; you have always been a—comfort. But then it must have been very, very dismal and gloomy for you to be in a house where there was nothing but trouble,” Alice said.
Her pretty eyes were swimming in tears. It gave her a little pang to think that perhaps this visitor, though he had been so kind, had been staying out of mere civility, and thinking it hard. It was not out of any other feeling in her mind that she was aware of; but to think that Fairfax had been longing to get away perhaps, feeling the tedium of his stay, gave her a sharp little shock of pain.
“Do not speak so—pray do not speak so,” said Fairfax, distressed. “That is not the reason. But I think I will go to the village. There I can be at hand whatever is wanted. You will know that I am ready by night or day—but I have no right to be here.”
Alice looked at him, scarcely seeing him through the great tears with which her eyes were brimming over. She put out her hand with a tremulous gesture of appeal.
“Then you think,” she said, in a voice which was scarcely louder than a whisper, “you think—it is very near?”
Fairfax felt that he could not explain himself. In the very presence of death could any one pause to think that Paul might find a visitor intrusive, or that the visitor himself might be conscious of a false position?