ich her troublesome solicitudes and her entire uselessness in
important matters had obliged him to push her while she lived. He often
had times when it seemed to him that he was thinking of nothing, and
then he found he had been thinking of her. At such times, with a pang,
he realized that he missed her; but perhaps the wound was to habit
rather than affection. He now sat down in his swivel-chair and turned it
from the writing-desk which stood on the rug before the fireplace, and
looked up into the eyes of her effigy with a sense of her intangible
presence in it, and with a dumb longing to rest his soul against hers.
She was the only one who could have seen him in his wish to have not
been what he was; she would have denied it to his face, if he had told
her he was a thief; and as he meant to make himself more and more a
thief, her love would have eased the way by full acceptance of the
theories that ran along with his intentions and covered them with
pretences of necessity. He thought how even his own mother could not
have been so much comfort to him; she would have had the mercy, but she
would not have had the folly. At the bottom of his heart, and under all
his pretences, Northwick knew that it was not mercy which would help
him; but he wanted it, as we all want what is comfortable and bad for us
at times. With the performance and purpose of a thief in his heart, he
turned to the pictured face of his dead wife as his refuge from the face
of all living. It could not look at him as if he were a thief.

The word so filled his mind that it seemed always about to slip from his
tongue. It was what the president of the board had called him when the
fact of his fraudulent manipulation of the company's books was laid so
distinctly before him that even the insane refusal, which the criminal
instinctively makes of his crime in its presence, was impossible. The
other directors sat blankly round, and said nothing; not because they
hated a scene, but because the ordinary course of life among us had not
supplied them with the emotional materials for making one. The
president, however, had jumped from his seat and advanced upon
Northwick. "What does all this mean, sir? I'll tell you what it means.
It means that you're a thief, sir; the same as if you had picked my
pocket, or stolen my horse, or taken my overcoat out of my hall."

He shook his clenched fist in Northwick's face, and seemed about to take
him by the throat. Afterwards h