“And she?” Jean le Roi asked softly.
Johnson spread out his yellow-stained fingers. His voice trembled, his eyes shone. It was like speaking of something holy.
“She is a great lady,” he said. “She goes to Court, she has houses, and horses and carriages, troops of servants, a yacht, motor-cars. She is rich—fabulously rich, Jean. She has—listen—forty thousand pounds, livres mind, a year.”
“More than that,” Hurd muttered.
“More than that,” Johnson repeated.
Jean le Roi was no longer unmoved. He drew a long breath and his teeth seemed to come together with a click.
“There is no mistake?” he asked softly. “An income of forty thousand pounds?”
“There is no mistake,” Stephen Hurd assured him. “I will answer for that.”
Jean le Roi’s face was white and vicious. Yet for a time he said nothing and his two companions watched him anxiously. There was something uncanny about his silence.
“It is a great deal of money,” he said at last. “Often in prison I was hungry, I had no cigarettes. I was forced to drink water. A great deal of money! And she is my wife! Half of what she has belongs to me! That is the law, eh?”