So she had at the
moment no idea of spying on him.
But she certainly was. For she discovered that Edward
Ashburnham was paying a blackmailer of whom she had never
heard something like three hundred pounds a year . . . It was a
devil of a blow; it was like death; for she imagined that by that
time she had really got to the bottom of her husband's liabilities.
You see, they were pretty heavy. What had really smashed them
up had been a perfectly common-place affair at Monte Carlo--an
affair with a cosmopolitan harpy who passed for the mistress of a
Russian Grand Duke. She exacted a twenty thousand pound pearl
tiara from him as the price of her favours for a week or so. It
would have pipped him a good deal to have found so much, and
he was not in the ordinary way a gambler. He might, indeed, just
have found the twenty thousand and the not slight charges of a
week at an hotel with the fair creature. He must have been worth
at that date five hundred thousand dollars and a little over. Well,
he must needs go to the tables and lose forty thousand pounds. . . .
Forty thousand solid pounds, borrowed from sharks! And even
after that he must--it was an imperative passion--enjoy the favours
of the lady.
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