We follow him.  Not very long after his arrival at the mill, Dagworthy himself appeared.  Hood’s evil conscience led him to regard with apprehension every unusual event.  Dagworthy’s unwonted earliness was still troubling his mind, when a messenger summoned him to the private room.  There was nothing extraordinary in this, but Hood, as he crossed the passage, shook with fear; before knocking and pushing open the door, he dashed drops from his forehead with his hand.  Dagworthy was alone, sitting at the desk.

‘Shut the door,’ he said, without turning his eyes from a letter he was reading.

The clerk obeyed, and stood for a full minute before anything more was addressed to him.  He knew that the worst had come.

Dagworthy faced half round.

‘One day early last week,’ he began, averting his eyes after a single glance, ’I was looking over one of these ledgers’—­he pointed to the shelf—­’and left an envelope to mark a place.  I forgot about it, and now that I look, the envelope has gone.  It contained a bank-note.  Of course you came across it in the course of your work.’

It was rather an assertion than a question.  Whilst he was speaking, the courage of despair had taken hold upon his hearer.  Like the terrible flash of memory which is said to strike the brain of a drowning man, there smote on Hood’s mind a vision of the home he had just quitted, of all it had been and all it might still be to him.  This was his life, and he must save it, by whatever means.  He knew nothing but that necessity; all else of consciousness was vague swimming horror.

‘No, sir,’ was his reply, given with perfect firmness, ’I found no envelope.’

Dagworthy’s coarse lips formed a smile, hard and cruel.  He faced his clerk.

‘Oh, you didn’t?’

‘In which ledger did you leave it, sir?’ Hood asked, the dryness of his throat rendering speech more difficult as he proceeded.  Still, his eye was fixed steadily on Dagworthy’s face; it was life at stake.  ’I have not had them all.’

‘I don’t remember which it was,’ replied the other, ’and it doesn’t much matter, since I happen to know the note.  I dare say you remember buying a new hat in Hebsworth last Friday?’

The love of inflicting pain for its own sake, an element of human nature only overgrown by civilisation, was showing itself strongly in Dagworthy.  He was prolonging this scene.  On his way to the mill he had felt that the task would be rather disagreeable; but we cannot nurture baseness with impunity, and, face to face with a man under torture, he enjoyed the spectacle as he scarcely would have done a little while ago.  Perhaps the feeling that his first blow at Emily was actually struck gave him satisfaction, which he dwelt upon.

Hood made no reply to the question.  He would not admit to himself that this was the end, but he had no voice.

‘You hear me?’ Dagworthy reminded him.