“You and your brother rank as creditors. Eventually, therefore, some small portion of your property may be recovered, once the affairs of the bank are finally wound up. This however will probably not be known for some months, and in any case it will not be much. Geoffrey’s settlements on you at the time of your marriage, by-the-by, I never thought of. I wonder if they will be considered your property. I am not enough acquainted with such matters to say. But in any case, my dearest Marion, I fear very, very little will be recovered. It is so dreadful. I don’t understand how I am able to talk about it so coolly.”
Marion did not speak for a few moments. Then she said:
“Have many others suffered in the same way—to the same extent?”
Veronica looked rather conscience-stricken.
“To tell you the truth,” she said, “I did not ask; I was so absorbed in your part of it. But no one I am sure can have suffered to the same extent, for Mr. Linthwaite had not nearly so much money in the bank, and his wife is rich besides. Doubtless many of the farmers in the neighbourhood will have lost what to them will be as much as Geoffrey’s is to him. It is all owing to his having unfortunately kept his whole property there these last few months. A thing he never contemplated save as a temporary convenience of course.”
“And Mr. Wrexham?” asked Marion.
“Mr. Wrexham!” repeated Veronica. “Did you not know it was all his doing, that he has absconded? But, of course, not—how could you?”
And then she related to Marion the details she had gathered from Geoffrey of the reputed millionaire’s little suspected rascality.
Mrs. Baldwin heard her in silence; but when all had been told she exclaimed passionately:
“Then, Veronica, the whole is my doing. Geoffrey’s instinct was truer than mine. He distrusted that man from the first, and I talked him out of it. I thought him clever, and I see now how he was flattering me up! What a fool I was! Oh, Veronica, those two or three weeks might have saved poor Geoffrey this ruin. It will break his heart, I know, and it is all my fault.”