Of what use to him
or to the estate would be a decision of the courts in his favour when the
diamonds should have been broken up and scattered to the winds of heaven?
Ten thousand pounds! It was, to Mr. Camperdown's mind, a thing quite
terrible that, in a country which boasts of its laws and of the execution
of its laws, such an impostor as was this widow should be able to lay her
dirty, grasping fingers on so great an amount of property, and that there
should be no means of punishing her. That Lizzie Eustace had stolen the
diamonds, as a pickpocket steals a watch, was a fact as to which Mr.
Camperdown had in his mind no shadow of a doubt. And, as the reader knows,
he was right. She had stolen them. Mr. Camperdown knew that she had stolen
them, and was a wretched man. From the first moment of the late Sir
Florian's infatuation about this woman, she had worked woe for Mr.
Camperdown. Mr. Camperdown had striven hard, to the great and almost
permanent offence of Sir Florian, to save Portray from its present
condition of degradation; but he had striven in vain. Portray belonged to
the harpy for her life; and moreover, he himself had been forced to be
instrumental in paying over to the harpy a large sum of Eustace money
almost immediately on her becoming a widow.
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