To one approaching casually Adèle Gertstein might have seemed asleep. She reclined with a sort of feline luxuriousness in a deck chair on one of the wide terraces of “Maid’s Retreat,” and beneath her the green sweep of the park, and the rolling woodlands and cornfields of Hampshire, smiled lazily back at the sun.
But her eyes were wide open, fixed unseeingly on the splendours of the country. She was trying to think, a process somewhat difficult to one whose actions were habitually guided by impulse. The effort always exasperated her, and only the most formidable and immediate necessity drove her to it.
She roused herself and crumpled the sheet of paper that had lain in her lap with a venomous hand. “Five thousand pounds,” she murmured. “How the devil am I to find five thousand pounds?”
To the wife of a millionaire such a sum perhaps ought not to seem impossible. But there were reasons why Adèle Gertstein dare not appeal to her husband. There were limits to his devotion, and he might well inquire why £12,000 a year was not sufficient for her needs.