He dined in the hotel with Eugene Miller. Neither the Erringtons nor the Comte de Lussigny were anywhere to be seen. After dinner, however, he found the elder lady waiting for him in the hall. They walked out into the quiet of the garden. She had been too upset to dine, she explained, having had a terrible scene with Betty. Nothing but absolute proofs of her lover’s iniquity would satisfy her. The world was full of slanderous tongues; the noblest and purest did not escape. For herself, she had never been comfortable with the Comte de Lussigny. She had noticed too that he had always avoided the best French people in hotels. She would give anything to save her daughter. She wept.
“And the unhappy girl has written him compromising letters,” she lamented.
“They must be got back.”
“But how? Oh, Monsieur Pujol, do you think he would take money for them?”
“A scoundrel like that would take money for his dead mother’s shroud,” said Aristide.
“A thousand pounds?”
She looked very haggard and helpless beneath the blue arc-lights. Aristide’s heart went out to her. He knew her type—the sweet gentlewoman of rural England who comes abroad to give her pretty daughter a sight of life, ingenuously confident that foreign watering-places are as innocent as her own sequestered village.
“That is much money, chère madame,” said Aristide.
“I am fairly well off,” said Mrs. Errington.
Aristide reflected. At the offer of a smaller sum the Count would possibly bluff. But to a Knight of Industry, as he knew the Count to be, a certain thousand pounds would be a great temptation. And after all to a wealthy Englishwoman what was a thousand pounds?