George
Fairfax, the man he suspected in the past; the man whom he had done his
best to keep out of his wife's pathway in the present, but who, by some
fatality, was not be avoided. Had Clarissa cultivated an intimacy with this
Bohemian painter and his wife only for the sake of meeting George Fairfax
without her husband's knowledge? To suppose this was to imagine a depth of
depravity in the heart of the woman he loved. And he had believed her so
pure, so noble a creature. The blow was heavy. He stood looking at his
servant for a moment or so, paralysed; but except that one blank gaze, he
gave no sign of his emotion. He only took up his hat, and went quietly out.
"His looks was orful!" the man said afterwards in the servants' hall.
Sophia came out of the drawing-room to look for her father, just a little
disturbed by the thought of what she had done. She had gone too far,
perhaps. There had been something in her father's look when he asked her
for that address that had alarmed her. He was gone; gone _there_, no doubt,
to discover his wife's motives for those strange visits. Miss Granger's
heart was not often fluttered as it was this evening. She could not "settle
to anything," as she said herself, but wandered up into the nursery, and
stood by the dainty little cot, staring absently at her baby brother as he
slept.
"If anything should happen," she thought--and that event which she vaguely
foreshadowed was one that would leave the child motherless--"I should make
it _my_ duty to superintend his rearing.
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