and Co.

Meanwhile Mr. Hornett's employer, with that dreadful rooted secret in
his mind, which he did not dare to look at, sat alone, looking with
staring eyes before him, and drumming in a regular tune upon the topmost
note of the terrible little pile. He had locked the notes away before
Brown's departure, but they had seemed to draw him to the safe with
almost a physical compulsion, and he had brought them out again to look
at them, to handle them, to count them, to resolve in his own mind that
he did not hanker after them, and was honourable to the core. It was so
new a thing to be tempted, that at times his own self-deception was made
easy to him. It did not occur to him to reflect that the need and the
means had never so presented themselves together until now, or that his
life-long honour had depended upon their absence.

When he had sat in silence for a while he awoke to the fact that the
interview had been nothing but a succession of shocks to him, and that
he was bodily exhausted. He rose, and, walking feebly to the inner room,
applied himself anew to the brandy bottle he kept there. He had gone
much too often to that deceptive solace lately, and he knew it; but each
successive visit carried its own excuses with it, and it had never in
any individual instance been worth while to resist a habit which it was
always easy to condemn in the main.

The brandy enlightened him and opened new sluices of emotion. Perhaps
for the moment he was a better man because of it. He seemed to wake to a
more determined sense of the enormity of the temptation which lay before
him. He thought of his own son, and a shadow took him from head to
foot as, in a brandified nervous vision, he beheld some shadowy
supposititious creature in the act of telling the tale to Phil. The vice
of drink has had the creation of many other vices laid to its charge,
but for once in the world's history the obfuscated vision was clearer
than the natural, and Philip drunk a better man, and a more righteous
and honourable, than Philip sober.

At bottom, Philip Bommaney knew himself too well to be at all sure that
this phase of feeling would endure with him; and in a half-conscious
dread of the return of that baser self, whose first appearance in
his history had so affrighted him, he hurriedly attired himself for
out-of-doors, crammed the bundle of notes into an inner pocket of his
overcoat, and, after a final appeal to the decanter, left his room with
a