He remained smoking, purposeless, in the parlour until all sounds had ceased overhead in the bedroom.  Then he extinguished the gas in the parlour, in the back room, in the kitchen, and finally in the lobby, and went upstairs by the light of the street lamp.  In the bedroom Rachel lay in bed, her eyes closed.  She did not stir at his entrance.  He locked the bank-notes in a drawer of the dressing-table, undressed with his usual elaborate care, approached Rachel’s bed and gazed at her unresponsive form, turned down the gas to a pinpoint, and got into bed himself.  Not the slightest sound could be heard anywhere, either in or out of the house, save the faint breathing of Rachel.  And after a few moments Louis no longer heard even that.  In the darkness the mystery of the human being next him began somehow to be disquieting.  He was capable of imagining that he lay in the room with an utter stranger.  Then he fell asleep.

CHAPTER XII

RUNAWAY HORSES

I

Rachel, according to her own impression the next morning, had no sleep during that night.  The striking of the hall clock could not be heard in the bedroom with the door closed, but it could be felt as a faint, distinct concussion; and she had thus noted every hour, except four o’clock, when daylight had come and the street lamp had been put out.  She had deliberately feigned sleep as Louis entered the room, and had maintained the soft, regular breathing of a sleeper until long after he was in bed.  She did not wish to talk; she could not have talked with any safety.

Her brain was occupied much by the strange and emotional episode of Julian’s confession, but still more by the situation of her husband in the affair.  Julian’s story had precisely corroborated one part of Mrs. Maldon’s account of her actions on the evening when the bank-notes had disappeared.  Little by little that recital of Mrs. Maldon’s had been discredited, and at length cast aside as no more important than the delirium of a dying creature; it was an inconvenient story, and would only fit in with the alternative theories that money had wings and could fly on its own account, or that there had been thieves in the house.  Far easier to assume that Mrs. Maldon in some lapse had unwittingly done away with the notes!  But Mrs. Maldon was now suddenly reinstated as a witness.  And if one part of her evidence was true, why should not the other part be true?  Her story was that she had put the remainder of the bank-notes on the chair on the landing, and then (she thought) in the wardrobe.  Rachel recalled clearly all that she had seen and all that she had been told.  She remembered once more the warnings that had been addressed to her.  She lived the evening and the night of the theft over again, many times, monotonously, and with increasing woe and agitation.