expenses to Nauheim. She handed over the money to the boy
husband, for Maisie would never have allowed it; but the husband
was in agonies of fear. Poor devil!

I fancy that, on the voyage from India, Leonora was as happy as
ever she had been in her life. Edward was wrapped up,
completely, in his girl--he was almost like a father with a child,
trotting about with rugs and physic and things, from deck to deck.
He behaved, however, with great circumspection, so that nothing
leaked through to the other passengers. And Leonora had almost
attained to the attitude of a mother towards Mrs Maidan. So it had
looked very well--the benevolent, wealthy couple of good people,
acting as saviours to the poor, dark-eyed, dying young thing. And
that attitude of Leonora's towards Mrs Maidan no doubt partly
accounted for the smack in the face. She was hitting a naughty
child who had been stealing chocolates at an inopportune
moment. It was certainly an inopportune moment. For, with the
opening of that blackmailing letter from that injured brother
officer, all the old terrors had redescended upon Leonora. Her
road had again seemed to stretch out endless; she imagined that
there might be hundreds and hundreds of such things that Edward
was concealing from her--that they might necessitate more
mortgagings, more pawnings of bracelets, more and always more
horrors. She had spent an excruciating afternoon. The matter was
one of a divorce case, of course, and she wanted to avoid publicity
as much as Edward did, so that she saw the necessity of
continuing the payments. And she did not so much mind that.
They could find three hundred a year. But it was the horror of
there being more such obligations.