“I don’t know about that,” Stephen Hurd said, “but she has certainly treated you very badly.”
Jean le Roi struck the table with his fist, not violently, and yet somehow with a force which made itself felt.
“It is over—that!” he said. “I am a man who knows when he has been ill-treated; who knows, too, what it is that a wife owes to her husband. Tell me where it is that she lives, old man. Write it down.”
Johnson drew from his pocket a stump of pencil and the back of an envelope. He wrote slowly and with care. Jean le Roi extended the palm of his hand to Stephen Hurd.
“He will warn madame, perhaps,” he suggested. “Why does he sit here with us, this young man? Is it that he, too, wants money?”
“No! no! my son,” Johnson intervened hastily. “Madame treated him badly. He would not be sorry to see her humiliated.”
Jean le Roi smiled.
“It shall be done,” he promised. “But from one of you I must have money. I cannot present myself before my wife so altered. No one would believe my story.”
“How much do you want?” Hurd asked uneasily.
“Twenty pounds English,” Jean le Roi answered. “I cannot resume my appearance as a gentleman on less.”