"It was always his mania, that turf-gambling, and as a young man he got out of thousands at it. I thought how it would be—I declare I did—when he became restless here in Paris, just before the Epsom Meeting, and at last went off to it. 'You'll drop some hundreds over it, if you do go,' I said to him. 'Not I,' was his retort, 'since I have had children to drop hundreds over, I don't spare them for racehorses.' A wicked, reckless man!"
"And has he—dropped the hundreds, madam?"
"Hundreds!" she shrieked; and then, looking covertly around the roof, as if fearful others might be listening, she sunk her voice to a whisper: "He has lost thirty thousand pounds."
"Oh!" I exclaimed, in my horror. Mrs. Paler wrung her hands.
"Thirty thousand pounds, every pound of it—and I hope remorse will haunt him to his dying day! Epsom, Ascot, Goodwood—I know not how many other courses he has visited this summer, and has betted frantically at all. The mania was upon him again, and he could not stop himself. He is lying ill now at Doncaster, at one of the inns there, and his brother writes; he tells me they dare not conceal the facts from me any longer."
"Shall you not go over to him, madam?"
"I go over to him!" she retorted; "I would not go to him if he were dying. But that my children are his, I would never live with him again; I would never notice him: I would get a divorce if practicable, but for their sakes. You look shocked, Miss Hereford; but you, an unmarried girl, cannot realize the blow in all its extent. Do you think a man has any right wilfully to bring disgrace and misery upon his wife and children?"
"Oh, madam—no!"
"It is my punishment come home to me," she wildly exclaimed. "They told me how it would be, sooner or later, if I persisted in marrying James Paler: but I would not listen to them. My mother and sisters will say it serves me right."
I heard the children squealing and kicking at the schoolroom door, and did not dare to go to them.