dded, "I want it."

He handed her the written confession.

"I simply can't bear to hear you reading it," said Rachel
passionately. "All about a prey to remorse and so on and so on! Why
do you want to confess? Why couldn't you have paid back the money and
have done with it, instead of all this fuss?"

"I must finish it now I've begun," Julian insisted sullenly.

"You'll do no such thing--not in my house."

And, repeating pleasurably the phrase "not in _my_ house," Rachel
stuck the confession into the fire, and feverishly forced it into the
red coals with lunges of the poker. When she turned away from the fire
she was flushing scarlet. Julian stood close by her on the hearth-rug.

"You don't understand," he said, with half-fearful resentment. "I had
to punish myself. I doubt I'm not a religious man, but I had to punish
myself. There's nobody in the world as I should hate confessing to as
much as Louis here, and so I said to myself, I said, 'I'll confess
to Louis.' I've been wandering about all the evening trying to bring
myself to do it.... Well, I've done it."

His voice trembled, and though the vibration in it was almost
imperceptible, it was sufficient to nullify the ridiculousness of
Julian's demeanour as a wearer of sackcloth, and to bring a sudden
lump into Rachel's throat. The comical absurdity of his bellicose
pride because he had accomplished something which he had sworn to
accomplish was extinguished by the absolutely painful sincerity of his
final words, which seemed somehow to damage the reputation of Louis.
Rachel could feel her emotion increasing, but she could not have
defined what her emotion was. She knew not what to do. She was in the
midst of a new and intense experience, which left her helpless. All
she was clearly conscious of was an unrepentant voice in her heart
repeating the phrase: "I don't care! I'm glad I stuck it in the fire!
I don't care! I'm glad I stuck it in the fire." She waited for the
next development. They were all waiting, aware that individual forces
had been loosed, but unable to divine their resultant, and afraid of
that resultant. Rachel glanced furtively at Louis. His face had an
uneasy, stiff smile.

With an aggrieved air Julian knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

"Anyhow," said Louis at length, "this accounts for four hundred and
fifty out of nine sixty-five. What we have to find out now, all of us,
is what happened to the balance."

"I don't care a fig about the bal