"Don't go to Newton, above all by yourself, Gervase," the wife was entreating, gravely and earnestly. "I am afraid my father may take the opportunity of trying to get money from you. He has entered horses for the Thorpe stakes: he will seek to make you enter them, and you told me yourself May and Highflyer were not fit to run this year. Or he will seek to lead you into some other transaction in horse-flesh, or have you into the house to play billiards and remain to dinner and cards all night, and there is always high play at Newton. My father is a needy man, and needy men are tempted to be unscrupulous; at least his code implies few scruples, where the letter of the laws of honour is complied with."
"It comes ill off your hand to say so," observed Gervase harshly. Undoubtedly he spoke no more than the truth, and such a life as Gervase Norgate's was not a school for magnanimity.
Die winced a little; and she was a woman whose fair cheek so rarely blushed, that her blushing was like another woman's crying. Die never cried; Gervase Norgate had never wrung a tear from her, or seen her shed a tear.
"Well, it was hard for me to say it," she admitted, with an accent of reproach in her equable tones; "but there the wrong and the shame are, and I owe it to myself and to you to warn you."
"I wonder how much I owe your being here to Newton-le-Moor being little better than a not very reputable gambling-house," exclaimed Gervase rudely.
She looked at him with her wide-open eyes, as if she had been struck, but did not care to own the blow.
"It was not to much profit where you were concerned," he continued, in an infatuation of brutality; "it did not get you so much as a pocket-handkerchief, or a flower-garden like that down there, or," glancing round him, "trumpery hangings and mirrors, and a new gown or two, or any other of the miserable trash for which women sell themselves."
She neither spoke nor stirred.
He had worked himself into a blindness of rage, in which he could see nothing before him but the possibility of moving her, of breaking down and destroying her calm front.
"And I wonder how much you owe your being here to my being a prodigal clutching at any respite? You may well come down lightly on my faults, Madam; they have made you the mistress of Ashpound in the present, and won for you its widow's jointure in the future. If I had known all beforehand, I might not have encumbered myself in vain. As it is, I do not think it becomes you to lecture me on keeping company with your own father."