to leave the spending of his own income in his own hands. And she had
fully meant to do that. I daresay she would have done it too; though, no
doubt, she would have spied upon his banking account in secret. She
was not a Roman Catholic for nothing. But she took so serious a view
of Edward's unfaithfulness to the memory of poor little Maisie that she
could not trust him any more at all.

So when she got back to Branshaw she started, after less than a month,
to worry him about the minutest items of his expenditure. She allowed
him to draw his own cheques, but there was hardly a cheque that she did
not scrutinize--except for a private account of about five hundred a
year which, tacitly, she allowed him to keep for expenditure on his
mistress or mistresses. He had to have his jaunts to Paris; he had to
send expensive cables in cipher to Florence about twice a week. But she
worried him about his expenditure on wines, on fruit trees, on harness,
on gates, on the account at his blacksmith's for work done to a new
patent Army stirrup that he was trying to invent. She could not see
why he should bother to invent a new Army stirrup, and she was really
enraged when, after the invention was mature, he made a present to the
War Office of the designs and the patent rights. 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 Bayha