“I don’t know what I have come to tell you. I have come to collect some of my things. You speak as if I had some important decision to make. You forget that there is nothing important about me, mother, one way or another,” Paul said with a smile. It was an angry smile, and it did not reassure his anxious hearer. He gave a little wave with his hand towards the larger room. “Fairfax is with me,” he said.
“Mr. Fairfax! I thought we might have had you to ourselves for this time at least.” There was a querulous tone in her voice. He did not know that she was thinking of what he considered an old affair, of a separation which might be for ever. All that had been swept away completely out of Paul’s mind as if it had never been, and he could not comprehend her anxiety. “But,” she added, recollecting herself, “I might have known that could not be. Paul, I don’t know what you will say to me. I was in a great difficulty. I did not know what to do. I have let him come to the house. He is here, actually staying here now.”
“He! What do you mean by he?” Then while she looked at him with the keenest anxiety, a gleam of understanding and contemptuous anger came over his face. “Well!” he said, “I suppose you could not shut him out of what is his own house.”
“I might have left it, my dear. I intend to leave it——”
“Why?” he said; “if you can live under the same roof with him, why not? Do you think I will have any objection? It cannot matter much to me.”
It was all settled then! She looked at him wistfully with a smile of pain, clasping her hands together. “He is very friendly, Paul. He wants to be very kind. And it is better there should be no scandal. I have your—poor father’s memory to think of—”
Paul’s face again took its sternest look. “It is a pity he himself had not thought a little of what was to come after. I am going to put my things together, mother.”
“But you will stay, you are not going away to-night—not directly, Paul!”
“Shall I have to ask Sir Gus’s leave to stay?” he said with a harsh laugh.
“Oh, Paul, you are very unkind, more unkind than he is,” said Lady Markham, with tears in her eyes. “He has never taken anything upon him. Up to this moment it has never been suggested to me that I was not in my own house.”