etty 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
was still in the arms of his Circe--at Antibes, to which place they had
retired. He got sick of the lady quite quickly, but not before Leonora
had had such lessons in the art of business from her attorney that she
had her plan as clearly drawn up as was ever that of General Trochu for
keeping the Prussians out of Paris in 1870. It was about as effectual at
first, or it seemed so.

That would have been, you know, in 1895, about nine years before the
date of which I am talking--the date of Florence's getting her hold over
Leonora; for that was what it amounted to.... Well, Mrs Ashburnham had
simply forced Edward to settle all his property upon her. She could
force him to do anything; in his clumsy, good-natured, inarticulate
way he was as frightened of her as of the devil. And he admired her
enormously, and he was as fond of her as any man could be of any woman.
She took advantage of it to treat him as if he had been a person whose
estates are being managed by the Court of Bankruptcy. I suppose it was
the best thing for him.

Anyhow, she had no end of a job for the first three years or so.
Unexpected liabilities kept on cropping up--and that afflicted fool did
not make it any easier. You see, along with the passion of the chase
went a frame of mind that made him be extraordinarily ashamed of
himself. You may not believe it, but he really had such a sort of
respect for the chastity of Leonora's imagination that he hated--he was
positively revolted at the thought that she should know that the sort
of thing that he did existed in the world. So he would stick out in an
agitated way against the accusation of ever having done anything. He
wanted to preserve the virginity of his wife's thoughts. He told me that
himself during the long walk