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. He got them, of course, when it was a matter of solid
bargaining, for far less than twenty thousand, as he might, no
doubt, have done from the first. I daresay ten thousand dollars
covered the bill. Anyhow, there was a pretty solid hole in a
fortune of a hundred thousand pounds or so. And Leonora had to
fix things up; he would have run from money-lender to
money-lender. And that was quite in the early days of her
discovery of his infidelities--if you like to call them infidelities.
And she discovered that one from public sources. God knows
what would have happened if she had not discovered it from
public sources. I suppose he would have concealed it from her
until they were penniless. But she was able, by the grace of God,
to get hold of the actual lenders of the money, to learn the exact
sums that were needed. And she went off to England.

Yes, she went right off to England to her attorney and his while he