mistress. It might have been a relief from Edward's sentimental
gurglings over the lady and from the lady's submissive acceptance
of those sounds. No, she would not have minded.

But, in boxing Mrs Maidan's ears, Leonora was just striking the
face of an intolerable universe. For, that afternoon she had had a
frightfully painful scene with Edward.

As far as his letters went, she claimed the right to open them when
she chose. She arrogated to herself the right because Edward's
affairs were in such a frightful state and he lied so about them that
she claimed the privilege of having his secrets at her disposal.
There was not, indeed, any other way, for the poor fool was too
ashamed of his lapses ever to make a clean breast of anything. She
had to drag these things out of him.

It must have been a pretty elevating job for her. But that afternoon,
Edward being on his bed for the hour and a half prescribed by the
Kur authorities, she had opened a letter that she took to come
from a Colonel Hervey. They were going to stay with him in
Linlithgowshire for the month of September and she did not know
whether the date fixed would be the eleventh or the eighteenth.
The address on this letter was, in handwriting, as like Colonel
Hervey's as one blade of corn is like another. 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