he could just catch the soothing
murmur of women's voices in the parlour beneath the reverberating,
solemn pulse of the lobby clock.

IV

Louis Fores had been intoxicated into a condition of poesy. He was
deliciously incapable of any precise thinking; he could not formulate
any theory to account for the startling phenomenon of a roll of
bank-notes loose under a chair on a first-floor landing of his
great-aunt's house; he could not even estimate the value of the
roll--he felt only that it was indefinitely prodigious. But he had the
most sensitive appreciation of the exquisite beauty of those pieces of
paper. They were not merely beautiful because they stood for delight
and indulgence, raising lovely visions of hosiers' and jewellers'
shops and the night interiors of clubs and restaurants--raising one
clear vision of himself clasping a watch-bracelet on the soft arm of
Rachel who had so excitingly smiled upon him a moment ago. They were
beautiful in themselves; the aspect and very texture of them were
beautiful--surpassing pictures and fine scenery. They were the most
poetic things in the world. They transfigured the narrow, gaslit
first-floor landing of his great-aunt's house into a secret and
unearthly grove of bliss. He was drunk with quivering emotion.

And then, as he gazed at the divine characters printed in sable on the
rustling whiteness, he was aware of a stab of ugly, coarse pain. Up to
the instant of beholding those bank-notes he had been convinced that
his operations upon the petty-cash book would be entirely successful
and that the immediate future of Horrocleave's was assured of
tranquillity; he had been blandly certain that Horrocleave held no
horrid suspicion against him, and that even if Horrocleave's pate
did conceal a dark thought, it would be conjured at once away by the
superficial reasonableness of the falsified accounts. But now his mind
was terribly and inexplicably changed, and it seemed to him impossible
to gull the acute and mighty Horrocleave. Failure, exposure, disgrace,
ruin, seemed inevitable--and also intolerable. It was astonishing
that he should have deceived himself into an absurd security. The
bank-notes, by some magic virtue which they possessed, had opened
his eyes to the truth. And they presented themselves as absolutely
indispensable to him. They had sprung from naught, they belonged
to nobody, they existed without a creative cause in the material
world--and they were indisp