“Millions of times.” Sad, almost sombre, she hadn’t a shade of coquetry. “Kitty has debts—great heaped-up gaming debts.”
“But to such amounts?”
“Incredible amounts it appears. And mountains of others too. She throws herself all on our father.”
“And he has to pay them? There’s no one else?” Hugh asked.
She waited as if he might answer himself, and then as he apparently didn’t, “He’s only afraid there may be some else—that’s how she makes him do it,” she said. And “Now do you think,” she pursued, “that I don’t tell you things?”
He turned them over in his young perception and pity, the things she told him. “Oh, oh, oh!” And then, in the great place, while as, just spent by the effort of her disclosure, she moved from him again, he took them all in. “That’s the situation that, as you say, may force his hand.”
“It absolutely, I feel, does force it.” And the renewal of her appeal brought her round. “Isn’t it too lovely?”
His frank disgust answered. “It’s too damnable!”
“And it’s you,” she quite terribly smiled, “who—by the ‘irony of fate’!—have given him help.”
He smote his head in the light of it. “By the Mantovano?”