Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 119: what you’re looking at

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

102 THE COURT OF LONDON must be some egregious mistake, and bidding him return home and wait for me, I hurried to the bank, where I questioned the cashier, Mr. Ramsey being out at the time. I then learned enough to convince me that the affairs of the establishment had long been in a most disordered state, and that they had now reached a point when insolvency was Inevitable. With a suffocating sensation in the throat and a pressure upon the brain, I went into the private office and commenced an examination of the books. Little accustomed as I was to accounts, yet Heaven knows that it was far from a difficult matter to perceive even through that multitude of figures the utter ruin of the establishment. For two hours did I pore over those books, until my head swam round, my brain reeled, and my senses appeared to be deserting me. I waited for Ramsey — still he came not; and I at length took my departure. It was now five o'clock in the evening, and I felt so thoroughly wretched that IJ experienced a repugnance to return home. How could I reproach Eleanor for her extravagances, which a comparatively small sum would remedy, when my im- prudence in rushing headlong into that fatal partnership had involved us in ruin? I was demented, and feeling that I required to be alone in order to reason with myself, I entered a tavern and ordered dinner merely for the sake of having a private room for an hour or two. There I remained until nine o’clock, and Heaven only can tell what myriads of agonizing, despairing thoughts swept through my brain during that interval! ” There was another pause, at which Page was almost wildly impatient, though he said nothing; but the interest and curiosity now awakened within him were intense even to poignancy. “Oh, you can well believe that my reflections were of no pleasurable description!’ exclaimed the baronet, at length breaking a prolonged interval of silence. ‘‘ But I could have borne that ruin in which the villainy of my partners involved me — yes, I could have borne that cheerfully — had it not been for the crushing discoveries I had made respecting my wife. And as I meditated upon the duplicity of her conduct, suspicions of another nature began to steal into my mind, —at first gradually, faintly, and imper- ceptibly, like the breaking of the dawn, then with a gleaming Gomicbooks (E(@) Mm