"I know what you mean," he interrupted; seeing the subject affected her deeply, and he took a turn up and down the room before he spoke again.
"What could have induced him to kill himself?" he said, at length stopping abruptly in his walk.
"A Mr. Forde, who has been here to-day, demanding to see Leonora, and who is coming this evening to see you, told Williams he was afraid to meet his creditors. Williams, who has never seen the slightest evidence of shortness of money about this house, inclines to the opinion that Mr. Forde is mad, and I have done my best to confirm that opinion, but Mr. Forde I believe to be right; I am afraid you will find he destroyed himself, because he was a ruined man."
There was silence for a minute, broken only by the sound of Dolly's suppressed sobs.
"Poor fellow," said Lord Darsham; "he must have suffered horribly before it came to this."
"Only those who have gone through such an ordeal can imagine what he must have endured," she answered simply; "depend upon it his heart was broken days before he died."
"I never liked Werner," commented her auditor. "I always thought him a self-contained money-worshipping snob, and I never believed, spite of the purple and fine linen, that Leonora was happy in her marriage, but I am sorry for him now. A man who commits suicide must have an enormous capacity for misery, and a man who has an enormous capacity for misery must have had an enormous capacity for something better, had any opportunity for developing it occurred."
"You will forget my telegram," she entreated.
"I shall say nothing about it, which will amount to much the same thing," he answered.