ffairs and it made her more hateful to him--and more
worthy of respect.

Leonora, at any rate, had managed his money to some purpose. She had
spoken to him, a week before, for the first time in several years--about
money. She had made twenty-two thousand pounds out of the Branshaw
land and seven by the letting of Branshaw furnished. By fortunate
investments--in which Edward had helped her--she had made another six or
seven thousand that might well become more. The mortgages were all
paid off, so that, except for the departure of the two Vandykes and the
silver, they were as well off as they had been before the Dolciquita
had acted the locust. It was Leonora's great achievement. She laid the
figures before Edward, who maintained an unbroken silence.

"I propose," she said, "that you should resign from the Army and that
we should go back to Branshaw. We are both too ill to stay here any
longer."

Edward said nothing at all.

"This," Leonora continued passionlessly, "is the great day of my life."

Edward said:

"You have managed the job amazingly. You are a wonderful woman." He
was thinking that if they went back to Branshaw they would leave
Maisie Maidan behind. That thought occupied him exclusively. They must,
undoubtedly, return to Branshaw; there could be no doubt that Leonora
was too ill to stay in that place. She said:

"You understand that the management of the whole of the expenditure of
the income will be in your hands. There will be five thousand a year."
She thought that he cared very much about the expenditure of an income
of five thousand a year and that the fact that she had done so much
for him would rouse in him some affection for her. But he was thinking
exclusively of Maisie Maidan--of Maisie, thousands of miles away from
him. He was seeing the mountains between them--blue mountains and the
sea and sunlit plains. He said:

"That is very generous of you." And she did not know whether that were
praise or a sneer. That had been a week before. And all that week he had
passed in an increasing agony at the thought that those mountains, that
sea, and those sunlit plains would be between him and Maisie Maidan.
That thought shook him in the burning nights: the sweat poured from him
and he trembled with cold, in the burning noons--at that thought. He
had no minute's rest; his bowels turned round and round within him: his
tongue was perpetually dry and it seemed to him that the breath between
his teeth was