It was a
remarkably good stirrup.
I have told you, I think, that Edward spent a great deal of time, and
about two hundred pounds for law fees on getting a poor girl, the
daughter of one of his gardeners, acquitted of a charge of
murdering her baby. That was positively the last act of Edward's
life. It came at a time when Nancy Rufford was on her way to
India; when the most horrible gloom was over the household;
when Edward himself was in an agony and behaving as prettily as
he knew how. Yet even then Leonora made him a terrible scene
about this expenditure of time and trouble. She sort of had the
vague idea that what had passed with the girl and the rest of it
ought to have taught Edward a lesson--the lesson of economy. She
threatened to take his banking account away from him again. I
guess that made him cut his throat. He might have stuck it out
otherwise--but the thought that he had lost Nancy and that, in
addition, there was nothing left for him but a dreary, dreary
succession of days in which he could be of no public service . . .
Well, it finished him.
It was during those years that Leonora tried to get up a love affair
of her own with a fellow called Bayham--a decent sort of fellow.
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