She ascertained that an old gentleman called Mumford had been
ejected from his farm and had been given a little cottage rent-free,
where he lived on ten shillings a week from a farmers' benevolent
society, supplemented by seven that was being allowed him by the
Ashburnham trustees. Edward had just discovered that fact from
the estate accounts. Leonora had left them in his dressing-room
and he had begun to read them before taking off his marching-kit.
That was how he came to have a sword. Leonora considered that
she had been unusually generous to old Mr Mumford in allowing
him to inhabit a cottage, rent-free, and in giving him seven
shillings a week. Anyhow, Mrs Basil had never seen a man in
such a state as Edward was. She had been passionately in love
with him for quite a time, and he had been longing for her
sympathy and admiration with a passion as deep. That was how
they came to speak about it, in the Burmese garden, under the pale
sky, with sheaves of severed vegetation, misty and odorous, in the
night around their feet. I think they behaved themselves with
decorum for quite a time after that, though Mrs Basil spent so
many hours over the accounts of the Ashburnham estate that she
got the name of every field by heart.
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