“Oh, yes, we all know; but you were too soft-hearted. You should have risked a fit of tears from poor Mrs. Leigh—excuse me for saying so now—and sent her away.”
“I tried it a dozen times. Poor Amy would have broken her heart. She threatened even to go with her. And they say women don’t make friendships with each other!”
Fairfield shrugged his shoulders a little. “I suffer myself from my wife’s friends,” he said; “there’s always some ‘dear Clara’ or other putting the table out of joint, making me search heaven and earth when there’s anybody to dinner to find an odd man. But Mary has some——” Sense, he was going to say, but stopped short. Mrs. Fairfield was one of those who had concluded long ago that dear Amy was a little goose, taken sad advantage of by her persistent friend.
“Fairfield,” said Aubrey, “you could do me a great service if you would. Colonel Kingsward has just told me that he can’t send out a royal commission to examine my friends on this subject. You see him sometimes, I suppose. I know you belong to one of his clubs. Still more, he’s at his office all the morning, and you know him well enough to look in upon him there.”
“Well?” said Fairfield, dubiously.
“Couldn’t you stretch a point for my sake, and go—and tell him the real state of affairs in respect to Miss Lance, and how untrue it is, how ridiculously untrue, that she was kept at Forest-leigh by any will of mine? Why, it was a thing, as you have just said, that all the county knew! An infatuation—and nothing less than the bane of my whole married life.”
“Yes, I know—everybody thought so,” Mr. Fairfield said. That new idea—was it perhaps germinating faintly in his mind?—no one had thought of any other explanation, but yet——”
“If you were only to say so—only as much as that—that all my friends recognised the state of the case.”
“I could say that,” said Fairfield, with hesitation. “Don’t think me unfriendly, Aubrey, but it’s a little awkward for a man to interfere in another man’s affairs, and it’s not only your affairs that I know so well, but you see Kingsward’s too——”
“I am aware of that, Fairfield; still, to break off what I believe in my heart would be for his daughter’s happiness too——”