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 balance,” said Julian impetuously.  “I’ve said what I had to say and that’s enough for me.”

And he did not, in fact, care a fig about the balance.  And if the balance had been five thousand odd instead of five hundred odd, he still probably would not have cared.  Further, he privately considered that nobody else ought to care about the balance, either, having regard to the supreme moral importance to himself of the four hundred and fifty.