“Certainly I should. I could not bear a stranger there where my wife passed so many happy months when she was a child; moreover, I think that Lady Gwendolyn ought not to be living on six or seven hundred a year when I have thirty thousand, and I suppose she will not allow me to help her in any other way.”
“But, you see, Sir Lawrence, her ladyship knows that the Grange is only worth about eighty or ninety pounds a year; and if I were to offer her a fancy rent, she would immediately suspect something wrong.”
“It can’t be wrong for a man to support his wife. I wish, with all my heart, that Lady Gwendolyn had not a farthing, and then it would have been difficult for her to leave me, unless she had the law on her side.”
“I infer, from what she says, Sir Lawrence, that she considers herself to have the law on her side, but does not care to appeal to it.”
“I wish she would, with all my heart. The only thing I ask is an opportunity of explaining matters, and clearing myself. I should never have condemned her without proof.”
“When I begged her ladyship to reflect before she took a step that she might regret so much later, and mentioned how deceitful appearances often were, she told me that she had the fullest proof, and must needs believe her own eyes and ears.”
“Her own eyes!” repeated Sir Lawrence. “But she came straight from Paris here, I presume?”
“I do not know if am doing right, Sir Lawrence, but I cannot help telling you that when her ladyship came to me she had just returned from Borton, and not from Paris.”
Sir Lawrence became frightfully pale. He understood it all now.
“Then I am undone,” he said. “What my wife saw there she would certainly misconstrue, and she has left me no chance of explaining matters.”