The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 377: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

346 REYNOLDS’ WORKS ‘‘There must have been upwards of two thousand two hundred pounds in that cash-box the night before last,”’ he said to himself, ‘‘ and Anastatia took it all.” _ The merchant naturally concluded that his wife had been dreadfully extravagant in various ways, but he was be- wildered as to what particular debt could have amounted to so large asum. He knew that Anastasia did not gamble at the card-table, for the best of all possible reasons that she never played cards at all. It could not have been to assist her brother that she had been so suddenly pressed for money, because if so, the intervention of the man Shad- bolt would have been unnecessary. That it was one debt, and not several, which she had paid the night before last, was to be argued from the fact that only one creditor, or one creditor’s representative, having called to assert a pecuniary claim. Who, then, could be this one creditor, to whom she had contracted so immense a liability? for as a matter of course Sir Frederick felt convinced that Anastasia, and Anastatia only, had emptied the cash-box of its contents. For a moment the merchant thought of proceeding straight to his wife to question her on the subject, but this idea he the next instant banished from his mind. He had told her to say nothing more on the subject, he himself had avoided it; he felt that there would be something mean, little, and paltry in reopening that topic, inasmuch as the very prefatory words which in such a case he would have to utter must be to the effect that she had taken a much larger sum than he had anticipated or intended. Never- theless, Sir Frederick was resolved to institute some inves- tigation. His mind was troubled; suspicions, vague and indefinite, were rising up in his brain. He remembered his wife’s confusion when a week back he had sought her in the drawing-room immediately after her first interview with Shadbolt; he naturally considered that there was some- thing strange in the manner in which this same Shadbolt had come to persecute her on the night that she was receiv- ing company, — strange also that she should have been so much troubled when his visit was announced, and that with a sort of terror she should have granted him an inter- view instead of with becoming dignity bidding him call on a future day and a more suitable occasion. And now, too, Sir Frederick bethought himself of the way in which An- CORNICLIIOOKS (E(0) im