"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Tarns with humble eagerness, content to be a very minor tool in the hidden designs of the exalted. "And then you can go to bed." "Oh! It's of no consequence, I'm sure, sir," Mrs. Tams answered. Louis heard her say importantly and condescendingly to the messenger-- "Here ye are, young man." She shut the front door as though much relieved to get such a source of peril and infection out of the respectable house. Immediately afterwards strange things happened to Louis in the parlour. He had intended to return at once to his wife in order to continue the vague, staggered conversation about Julian's thunderbolt. But he discovered that he could not persuade himself to rejoin Rachel. A self-consciousness, growing every moment more acute and troublesome, prevented him from so doing. He was afraid that he could not discuss the vanished money without blushing, and it happened rarely that he lost control of his features, which indeed he could as a rule mould to the expression of a cherub whenever desirable. So he sat down in a chair, the first chair to hand, any chair, and began to reflect. Of course he was safe. The greatest saint on earth could not have been safer than he was from conviction of a crime. He might be suspected, but nothing could possibly be proved against him. Moreover, despite his self-consciousness, he felt innocent; he really did feel innocent, and even ill-used. The money had forced itself upon him in an inexcusable way; he was convinced that he had never meant to misappropriate it; assuredly he had received not a halfpenny of benefit from it. The fault was entirely the old lady's. Yes, he was innocent and he was safe. Nevertheless, he did not at all like the resuscitation of the affair. The affair had been buried. How characteristic of the inconvenient Julian to rush in from South Africa and dig it up! Everybody concerned had decided that the old lady on the night of her attack had not been responsible for her actions. She had annihilated the money--whether by fire, as Batchgrew had lately suggested, or otherwise, did not matter. Or, if she had not annihilated the money, she had "done something" with it--something unknown and unknowable. Such was the acceptable theory, in which Louis heartily concurred. The loss was his--at least half the loss was his--and others had no right to complain. But Julian was without discretion. Within twenty-four hours Julian might well set the whole district talking.