When the adieux were being said between the old friends, Mr. James Hornett had slid noiselessly downstairs, his mind inflated by pride. He was not proud of having played the eavesdropper, for even in Mr. Hornett’s economy of things, that was an act to be proud of; but he was very proud, indeed, to be associated with a gentleman so magnificently respected as Mr. Bommaney. There were not so very many people, he told himself, even in the City of London, which was full of wealth and probity, into whose hands so large a sum would be placed with so little a sense of the necessity of precaution. He felt as if he himself had been treated in this majestic manner, and the feeling warmed his heart. He bowed Mr. Brown from the office door with an _empressement_ which he feared a moment later might almost have betrayed him, and he went about his duties for the rest of the day in a mood of unusual contentment. The earlier memory of his employer’s disturbance crossed him sometimes, and always excited his curiosity; but the later feeling dominated him. He was delighted by his association with a concern so eminently respectable as that of Bommaney, Waite, and Co. Meanwhile Mr. Hornett’s employer, with that dreadful rooted secret in his mind, which he did not dare to look at, sat alone, looking with staring eyes before him, and drumming in a regular tune upon the topmost note of the terrible little pile. He had locked the notes away before Brown’s departure, but they had seemed to draw him to the safe with almost a physical compulsion, and he had brought them out again to look at them, to handle them, to count them, to resolve in his own mind that he did not hanker after them, and was honourable to the core. It was so new a thing to be tempted, that at times his own self-deception was made easy to him. It did not occur to him to reflect that the need and the means had never so presented themselves together until now, or that his life-long honour had depended upon their absence. When he had sat in silence for a while he awoke to the fact that the interview had been nothing but a succession of shocks to him, and that he was bodily exhausted. He rose, and, walking feebly to the inner room, applied himself anew to the brandy bottle he kept there. He had gone much too often to that deceptive solace lately, and he knew it; but each successive visit carried its own excuses with it, and it had never in any individual instance been worth while to resist a habit which it was always easy to condemn in the main.